You'll have to cough up a significant fee while selling items on the real-money auction house in upcoming action-roleplaying game Diablo III.

When you sell commodities such as gems and recipes on the auction house, Blizzard will take a 15% cut of the final sales price, the developer revealed today. When you sell equipment such as weapons or armor, Blizzard will take $1 per item.

Blizzard will also take its own 15% cut as a transfer fee if you cash out to third-party payment service PayPal. (This is in addition to any fees that PayPal may charge on its own.) If you want to avoid that fee, your only option is to deposit your profits in your Battle.net Balance, which you can then use to buy Blizzard games or more items at the Diablo III auction house. You can link a credit card to pay for items, but you can't use it to receive money.

"Note that the process of sending proceeds to a third-party payment service will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service," Blizzard writes in its FAQ. "Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the real-money auction house that have been sent to the player's Battle.net Balance will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account."

Your Battle.net Balance will cap at $250, after which you will no longer be able to put items up for sale in the real-money auction house. The maximum amount you can bid on an item is $250. The minimum is $1.25.

Auction House [Blizzard]

Diablo III Auction House - Functionality [Blizzard]

You'll have to cough up a significant fee while selling items on the real-money auction house in upcoming action-roleplaying game Diablo III.

That's the catch associated with one of the big new features in Blizzard's big new game: the fact that you'll be able to buy and sell in-game items with other players in Diablo III. You couldn't do this officially in earlier Diablo games. In the new one you can, but with fees attached.

So what are you going to be able to buy and sell? Gold. Items. Money and loot, basically. And since Diablo games are all about collecting loot, this is probably going to be a popular feature—so popular that you just might want to turn some in-game sales with other players into real money to line your wallet. And that's where the fees come in.

When you sell commodities such as gems and recipes on the auction house, Blizzard will take a 15% cut of the final sales price, the developer said in an extensive FAQ posted today. When you sell equipment such as weapons or armor, Blizzard will take $1 per item.

Blizzard will also take its own 15% cut as a transfer fee if you cash out to third-party payment service PayPal. (This is in addition to any fees that PayPal may charge on its own.) If you want to avoid that fee, your only option is to deposit your profits in your Battle.net Balance, which you can then use to buy digital copies of Blizzard games or more items at the Diablo III auction house. Your Battle.net Balance can't be turned into cash. You can link a credit card to pay for items, but you can't use it to receive money.

In other words, if you're selling commodities and you want to turn your profits into real cash (not Battle.net funds), you'll have to pay Blizzard a 15% sales fee, then a 15% transfer fee. If you're selling equipment and you want to turn your profits into cash, you'll have to pay a $1/item sales fee, then a 15% transfer fee.

"Note that the process of sending proceeds to a third-party payment service will be subject to applicable fees charged by Blizzard and the third-party payment service," Blizzard writes in its FAQ. "Also, any proceeds from the sale of items in the real-money auction house that have been sent to the player's Battle.net Balance will not be transferrable to the third-party payment service account."

For avid Diablo III players, these fees could add up quickly. They could also drive players to buy and sell on the shady black market websites that were prevalent back in the early 2000s, when Blizzard had no official real-money auction house for the popular series. But Blizzard says even with transaction fees, players will prefer the officially sanctioned system.

"The item-based nature of Diablo gameplay has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem, and a significant part of this trade has been conducted through unsecure third-party organizations," Blizzard said. "This has led to numerous customer-service and game-experience issues that we've needed to account for. Our primary goal with the Diablo III auction house system is for it to serve as the foundation for a player-driven economy that's safe, fun, and accessible to everyone."

Your Battle.net Balance will cap at $250, after which you will no longer be able to put items up for sale in the real-money auction house. The maximum amount you can bid on an item is $250. The minimum is $1.25.

Blizzard also said they will not be putting items up for sale themselves; all transactions will be left up to players.

Auction House [Blizzard]

Diablo III Auction House - Functionality [Blizzard]

Developer Blizzard today released a full list of the region servers that will be available in Diablo III, again reiterating that you'll be able to play on any region's server in the upcoming action-roleplaying game.

Game servers will be divided into three regions: The Americas, Europe, and Asia. Any player will be able to pick any server to use, although you won't be able to transfer characters or items from server to server. You can switch between servers as many time as you'd like.

Here's a full breakdown of the server regions:

The Americas - For players in the US, Canada, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia.
Europe - For players in the European Union, Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, and Middle Eastern countries such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Asia - For players in South Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Auction houses, stashes, and friends lists, and most other individual info will be region-specific and won't transfer when you switch regions.

Blizzard's last game, StarCraft II, placed a strict region-lock on many of its servers. To play on multiple region's servers in most cases, you'd have to buy multiple copies of the game.

Diablo III Global Play FAQ [Blizzard]

You have fair warning. Next time you see a pleasant-looking old man searching for a seat on the subway, offer yours up to him.

Because he may be a vengeful Sith with a penchant for swift, bloody violence.

Sub Wars [YouTube via Reddit]

UC Berkeley student Derek Low is a master of science and technology. Here he uses his vast powers to create a dorm room that reacts to his every whim, even if that whim is playing irritating house music.

He calls the project B.R.A.D. — Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm — and while I am not seeing any ridiculous, I see plenty of automation. Using only the power of his mind, some readily available consumer electronics, and several hundred dollars, Low has taken all of the arm movement and step-taking out of opening and closing his blinds and adjusting lighting conditions.

And then there's party mode.

Party mode takes me back to when I was 15 and my friend John Dykes and I decided to tape thousands of strands of torn magnetic cassette tape to the ceiling, aim a fan at it, turn on the strobe light and proceed to trip balls. It was a monumental effort and the end result, while impressive, would never be seen by anyone else, because we had no friends except that one girl who stole us Swatches from the mall so we'd like her.

If only we had YouTube back then.

Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm (BRAD) [YouTube via Reddit]

Sometimes you just want to wander around a room and slash things with a sword. While listening to great 8-bit tunes. And squishing adorable baddies like bees and slimes. And collecting spell cards that poison or freeze or incinerate your opponents in glorious violent fashion.

Spellsword's got you covered.

Spellsword, a new arena battle RPG for iOS, puts you in the smudgy shoes of a sword-wielding hero, trapped on a battlefield and forced to fight off waves of enemies by jumping and slicing across a single screen. There are two modes: Mission and Endless. In Mission mode, you complete... well, missions, with goals like "collect 50 spell cards" or "defeat 30 slimes." In Endless mode, you defeat as many giant eyeballs and creepy bats as possible before you croak.

You can also collect money (Zelda-like rupees). You use it to boost your spell cards' stats and buy equipment like rings, amulets, and party hats.

Battling is addictive and more fun than it probably should be, thanks to the satisfying animations and infectious music that populate Spellsword's mob-filled stages. The iPad's touch controls could be a little more pleasant, and this is a game that would feel significantly better with a controller or keyboard, but hey, it works, and it's a blast.

Spellsword [$0.99, iTunes]

Move over, Weird Al. Portal's autotuned robot is taking your job. At least until you release a video game-themed cover of Call Me Maybe.

Warning: this video contains spoilers for Portal 2.

Portal 2 - If I Were A Core (Beyonce - If I Were A Boy Parody) [YouTube]

Absolutely stunning movie trailers for The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus exploded all over the web in the last 24 hours. A few weeks ago, it was the promo clips for Looper that got everybody buzzing. Like lots of other folks, I eagerly watched all those teasers over and over again. And I can't stop thinking about how I really, really want to play more games based on movies.

Yeah, I know it sounds like crazy talk. 99.9% of games based on movies suck. Why would I want more of that? Because I think tie-in games can be better. They have to get better eventually, don't they?

Normally, I'm all for the primacy of original story, vision and experience in the games I play. And nothing beats playing through an entertainment that originated as an interactive idea. But, something like the Prometheus trailer hints at a vast universe of visual and thematic ideas. I know dozens of great sci-fi games have dealt with the exploration and terror of space exploration. But Prometheus is coming from Ridley Scott, the man behind Alien and Blade Runner. Isn't it about time that we got a game spawned directly from his imagination?

Most of these movie-to-game projects start off from a great premise, a belief that games are great constructs for exploring the inside of a fictional world. That's absolutely true but efforts to actually do that get tripped up by not having enough time or vision to make a game world come alive the same way a movie world does. And, yes, engaging with works from the two media is very different, with movies being a more unilateral experience than games.

But, still, it feels like there's been a shift when it comes to adapting TV or movie properties into video games. Over the last decade, you couldn't turn a corner without seeing all sorts of tie-in games for movies like The Godfather, Jumper and The Matrix. But it feels like the flow of such releases has dwindled. Sure, Activision continues to do a brisk business with James Bond, Transformers and, um, Battleship games but they're only one publisher. More companies took similar risks in the past. A lot of the results were utterly forgettable, sure, but each one held the fleeting hope that the formula for adapting a big-screen spectacle into video-game form would be advanced by a little bit.

Now, though, it feels like any ambition for making a movie tie-in game that could hit the heights of, say, Starbreeze's work on The Chronicles of Riddick games. While the gameplay was fun, it wasn't extremely innovative. Those titles captured the mood and tone of their cinematic counterparts. Hell, I even dug the Wanted game that came out a little while back. It tried to explain some of the super-abilities that the film's assassin used through gameplay mechanics like cover chaining. The idea there was that Wesley moved so fast from one spot of cover to the next that he seemingly appeared in a new position out of nowhere. It's that kind of symbiosis I'd like to see more of.

I understand some of the hurdles that face the beleaguered sub-category of tie-in games. Movies can be made over shorter periods of time, and don't need the kinds of man-hours and resources that AAA games require. But movie games can be shorter, especially if they don't hit the $60 price point. I'd love to see tie-in games be more character-driven, too. Let the source film tell a story and let a tie-in game tell me about the guy who's intriguing but doesn't get enough screen time.

As The Avengers approaches release this week, the lack of a corresponding video game adventure feels like a huge void. (Vague promises are being made, though.) It's easy to write off the failures of recent years—Sega's Iron Man games, for example—as crass money grabs that deserved to fail. But, we're never going to get a true evolution of how movie-to-game translations can happen if movie studios or developers don't take the risks.

The full run of downloadable content for Max Payne 3 is available for pre-order starting today, two weeks before the game's console release (and about a month before it's PC release). All of it is multiplayer, and all of it can be bought in one $30 gulp if you don't want to buy it all a la carte. That's a savings of 35%, the game's creators at Rockstar revealed today. To get it, you'll have to buy the game's Rockstar Pass over Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and somehow (eventually) through your PC.

Here's the DLC schedule for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3:

June 2012

• Local Justice Map Pack: "Dubbed "Local Justice," the Map Pack includes the Police Precinct map for Gang Wars, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Payne Killer multiplayer modes. The pack will also feature two additional maps for Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Payne Killer, new precinct-themed multiplayer avatar items, multiplayer challenges, and more." [Editor's note: We've explained the story-based Gang Wars 16-player mode and the 8-player Payne Killer mode in our multiplayer preview of the game's multiplayer.]

Summer 2012

• Disorganized Crime Map Pack
• Deathmatch Made In Heaven Mode Pack
• Hostage Negotiation Map Pack
• New York Minute Co-Op Pack [Editor's note: Co-op? We haven't seen a second of co-op from this game. Interesting.]

Fall 2012

• Painful Memories Map Pack
• Trickle Down Economics Map Pack

Rockstar Games has released a lot of DLC for its major games. This is the first time the company has only outlined a plan for multiplayer DLC. We did give you the heads up: Rockstar is dead serious about multiplayer in their new game, and with good reason.