In a thread on Reddit, a user by the name of WishbonetheDog claims to have earned $10,000 through Diablo 3's Real Money Auction House since the game launched back in May.

The user backs up these claims with a pic of his Paypal account, showing numerous payments in the hundreds of dollars from Blizzard, with multiple payments some days, and the overall balance of the account sitting at over $10,000.

In his post and subsequent replies to users interested in learning more about his methods, Wishbone assures he has done everything by the books, without making use of cheats, exploits, or hacks of any kind. He even plans to pay taxes on his Diablo 3 earnings.

The university business student says there's no real secret to his method; it's all about finding undervalued items and re-selling them for a profit. He keeps enough in-game gold on hand at all times so he can purchase those items when available, and actually performs more transactions on the game's gold auction house than on its RMAH (about 2,000 versus 500).

He says he has never spent any money on the game other than the $60 to purchase it, and built his in-game empire up simply through playing the game (which he did for 8-14 hours per day initially), and keeping up on its ever-changing economy, and the value of items and stats. He notes that he was hit particularly hard when Blizzard nerfed attack speed, losing about 250 million gold worth of value on his items.

Despite earning so much money through Diablo 3's auction house, WishbonetheDog is not actively playing the game as much as he used to, citing the slowing game economy, real world obligations (including university studies and doing work in the stock market), and a desire to play other games, specifically mentioning League of Legends; quite a coup for Riot Games, and perhaps something they should consider mentioning in their ad campaigns ("sure, you can make $10,000 playing Diablo 3, but you'll wish you were playing LoL instead!").

He does however expect the economy to pick up substantially once PvP is available, so there is plenty of opportunity for anyone to start studying Diablo 3 Economics 101 and make some serious money from the game at that time.

Have you had any success making money through Diablo 3? Is it something you would like to get better at? Share your experiences with the game and its auction house below.