Every once in a while, the video game industry presents an opportunity for a damn hustle. There is a chance to earn some cash through legal (albeit unintentional) means. Moose runs in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, RuneScape’s party hat tycoons trade colorful cosmetics for Scrooge McDuck in-game gold tiers, now international Modern Warfare 2 Burger King Skin SellerFor some around the world, Activision Blizzard’s latest marketing push has opened up an opportunity to earn real-world cash, and one option is to walk away with a staggering profit.
But first, a look back at those who didn’t know. With the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the marketing team behind the game had a great idea. There’s nothing like developing a new video game and fast food in one night, so why not bring these worlds together and give players free in-game skins and XP boosts to help them along?
Food and beverages are reliable tools for video game promotion. You may have seen COD XP boosts on the side of energy drink cans or other high-sugar gamer supplements. Burger King’s latest run is the latest in a long tradition. But there are gaps in the campaign. Both the US and the UK were excluded from the global rollout, and both countries were crowded with hungry COD players. Craving cosmetics and cheeky experiences. Burgers too. For those far from the rest of the world, the grey market of code dealers is their only option.
“I’m gone [to Burger King] Three times the code,” Gabriel tweeted. A native of France, he was one of many people selling codes on social media to the desperate Anglo-American MW2 player base. “I did stop for two days, but I went back for the last time today. “He made over $200 in just three trips to his local Burger King, and he happily told me that he would be buying a new PC for Warzone 2.
Why buy this skin from a reseller? Well, it’s really simple. Since you can’t get it in the UK, the nearest place to sell is in France. On the cheap, a flight to Paris costs £68, while a trip along the Eurotunnel can be more expensive. This does not include the actual arrival at the airport or the tunnel, nor does it include the cost of the meal itself. Those prices also pale in comparison to those in the U.S., where you have to fly longer distances. For those in isolation, buying the code online makes the most sense if you’re desperate to get it, although the initial price seems ridiculous for bloody cosmetics.
In the world of Burgertown skin dealers, Gabriel is mid-sized. Advertising the codes he provides online, he – like many others – buys meals in bulk, collecting the codes before distributing them to interested parties online. However, as he believes the market is shrinking, he has made his last harvest and is making money with a ton of extra cash. Gabriel offers his codes for about $20, which is a lot for cosmetic and XP boosts (even for meals), but still manages to sell almost every code he posts there.
As we’ve reported on games like Lost Ark, the gray and even black market surrounding video games often sees this stumbling competition in terms of price. As reported last week, early-stage entrepreneurs on eBay are listing and successfully selling Burger Town codes for $60+. Over the past few days, we have seen prices plummet to $20 or lower as hordes of people try to get in on the action. The price of a meal is roughly the equivalent of five or six dollars, and even with this drop, sellers can still get a decent return.
But Gabriel, with $200 in his pocket and a smile on his face, doesn’t represent the lofty peak of the frankly lucrative gains that some Burgertown skin hustlers can pull off. Enter Jay, a car technician from New Zealand. He started scraping and selling code a lot after an American friend of his suggested selling the code after their own deal. result? In total, about 225 codes were sold for a total revenue of about $4,250. “I have a close family member working in BK but they don’t provide me with food so I have been paying for individual meals. Bulk but lots of meals”
On his first trip, Jay started small, bought about five meals, pocketed the code, and gave the food to his colleagues. He’s since claimed to be able to buy the code directly for the cost of a full meal, saving him from having to carry dozens of meals at a time like Death Stranding, reducing employee workloads and stopping a pile of food waste.
While interest in Gabriel has waned, Jay has only seen an uptick in eager buyers since launch, as more US and UK players learn of the Burger Town skin’s existence. For him, the problem is not demand, but time.
“It’s amazing how much it has built up since it launched, but I didn’t have time to uninstall about 70 codes individually until the weekend, so I sold the rest in bulk to cover what I paid for,” he said. . “I think I’ll sell 50 in batches and save the rest for friends and family.” As a bulk seller, Jay will likely enter codes into the now-expanding Hamburger City market in order to gain Profitable resale, or maybe even for a giveaway that has already started appearing online.
So where will Jay spend the money? In a wholesome incident, he and his significant other appear to be pregnant next January. The money he makes from the Burger Town skin market will be used as a safety net in case of financial troubles in the new year, although he does admit to spending around 5% of his gross income on his fiancé – I think we can all All agree it’s perfectly fair and anyone would have expected what they would have done in the same situation.
But there is an elephant in the room. Leaving aside his own legitimate success behind the Burger Town skin, does Jay think the event is a good thing? If it leads to a grey market for resellers, is it well thought out?
“[There are] There are so many different promotions in each region that it seems silly to me,” Jay concluded in our chat. “Because then you’ll have people taking advantage of it like I did – making a lot of money. He went on to point to the exclusive calling cards and camouflage camouflages that Carls Jr. promoted for Black Ops 3 in 2015, as experts in the game, as a similar style of promotion that had been well executed before.
It’s worth noting, however, that Carls Jr. isn’t the kind of brand that can be seen everywhere, especially in the UK. The promotion also includes a raffle, which means that even if you get the code, you may not get the prize you want. Guaranteed rewards are definitely better this time around, and while the chances of getting super rare prizes like a copy of the game or a dev studio visit are great, it can cause the same issues as it does now, except for the chance to redeem your grey market code for a duff In-game rewards.
Ultimately, in the broader scheme of things, the Hamburg City MW2 skin promotion caused the main problem with this market to be a special combination of real-world region locks, and when it comes to coding yourself.Whether this deal didn’t come to the UK and US because of money or time (this kind of deal does take months of planning, you know), or whether it’s deliberately driving up demand remains uncertain
For now, people like Jay and Gabriel, who see an opportunity to start a decent job and earn some extra cash for an expensive hardware upgrade or raise a family, seem like they’re here to stay. Use the official Burger King UK Twitter account Confirmation that there are no plans to promote Hamburg Town for our grieving island, and the land of the free and the unfathomable and unethical military spending sits in the same ironically hamburger-free boat.
If you’re looking for more Modern Warfare 2 content, we’ve got a guide to the Season 1 release date of Modern Warfare 2, and our best M4 loadout is here!
