$4000 later, he’s starting a family: For some, MW2’s Burger King skin grey market is paying out big
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Every once in a while, the video game industry provides an opportunity for a big hustle and bustle. An opportunity to earn some money through legitimate, albeit unintended, means. Moose runs in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, RuneScape party hat tycoons trading colorful cosmetics for Scrooge McDuck in-game gold levels, and now international Modern Warfare 2 Burger King skin vendors. For a select few around the world, Activision Blizzard’s latest marketing promotion has opened up an opportunity to earn real money in the real world, with a selection walking away with staggering profits.
But first, a summary for the uninformed. With the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the marketing team behind the game had a great idea. There’s nothing better than a night of trying out a new video game and some fast food, so why not bring those worlds together and give players a free in-game skin and XP boost to help them on their way?
Food and drink are a tried and true vehicle for video game promotions. You’ve likely seen COD XP boosts on the side of energy drink cans or other high-sugar player supplements. Burger King’s latest race is the latest in a long tradition. But there is a gap in the campaign. Both the US and the UK have been left out of this global promotion, both countries teeming with hungry COD players. Hungry for both cosmetics and a daring experience. And hamburgers too, probably. For those cut off from the rest of the world, the only recourse is a gray market of code resellers.
“I’ve gone [to Burger King] three times for codes”, says Gabriel through direct messages on Twitter. Originally from France, he is one of many who have taken to social media to promote their side business of selling codes to a desperate base of UK and US MW2 gamers. “I stopped for two days, but today I’m back for the last time.” With just three trips to his local Burger King, he’s made over $200, which he’s happy to tell me is going towards a new PC for Warzone 2.
Why would you buy this mask from a reseller? Well, it’s actually simple. Since you can’t get it here in the UK, the nearest place that sells it is France. On the cheap, it’s £68 for a flight to Paris, while a Eurotunnel trip can be even more expensive. This does not include getting to the airport or the tunnel, nor does it take into account the cost of the meal itself. These prices pale in comparison to those faced by Americans too, who will have to fly a greater distance. For those isolated, buying a code online makes more sense if you’re dying to get it, even though the initials seem like a ridiculous price for a damn cosmetic.
In the world of Burger Town’s skin touts, Gabriel is average in size. By advertising the codes he has available online, he, like many others, buys meals in bulk, collecting the codes before distributing them to interested parties online. However, due to what he perceives to be a shrinking market, he has made the last haul of it and is getting by with a good deal of extra money. Gabriel offers his codes for around $20 each, which is a lot for a cosmetic and XP boost (even with food), but he’s still managed to sell almost all the codes he’s posted.
As we reported in games like Lost Ark, the gray or even black markets around video games often see this race to the bottom when it comes to pricing. As reported last week, early eBay entrepreneurs were successfully posting and selling Burger Town codes for over $60. In the past few days, we have seen prices plummet to $20 or below as hordes of people tried to get in on the action. With a meal costing roughly the equivalent of five or six dollars, even with this refund, vendors are still making significant profits.
But Gabriel, with $200 in his pocket and a smile on his face, doesn’t represent the frankly respectable high-peak earnings that some Burger Town hustlers have been able to pull off. Enter Jay, an auto technician from New Zealand. After one of his friends from USA recommended to sell the codes following his own trading, he started to get and sell codes in bulk. The result? Around 225 codes were sold in total, bringing in an approximate sum of around $4,250. “I have a close family member who works at BK but they are not catering to me so I have been paying for individual meals. Bulk but lots of meals”
On his first trip, Jay started small, buying about five meals, saving the codes, and giving the food to his co-workers. Since then, he claims to have been able to buy the codes outright for the cost of the entire meal, saving him from having to carry dozens of meals at once Death Stranding-style, reducing the workload on employees and putting a lot of people on hold. . of food waste from being created.
While Gabriel saw a drop in interest, Jay has only seen an increase in enthusiastic buyers since launch as more American and British gamers have learned of the Burger Town skin’s existence. For him, the problem is not the demand, it is the time.
“Surprisingly, it’s recovered a lot since launch, but I don’t have time to download like 70 more codes individually until the weekend, so I’m selling the rest wholesale for what I paid for,” he says. “I think I’ll sell 50 wholesale and then save the rest for friends and family.” As a bulk seller, Jay is likely to enter codes into a Burger Town market that is currently expanding, codes are purchased with the intention of reselling them at a profit, or perhaps even for giveaways that have started to appear online.
So where will Jay spend all this money? In a positive turn of events, it appears that he and his partner are expecting a baby next January. This money he earned at the Burger Town fur market will go towards a safety net in case of financial trouble in the new year, although he did admit to spending about 5% of the total profit on his fiancée, which I think we can everyone agrees that it’s totally fair and what any guy would expect them to do in the same situation.
But there is an elephant in the room. Leaving aside his own legitimate success thanks to the Burger Town skins, does Jay think this event is any good? If it has resulted in a gray market of resellers, was it well thought out?
“[There are] too many different promotions per region, which is stupid in my opinion”, concludes Jay in our chat. “Because then you will have people exploiting it like I have, making a lot of money.” He went on to point to a 2015 Carls Jr. promo for Black Ops 3 for an exclusive calling card and camouflage for Ruin, a specialist in the game as a previously well-executed similar-style promo.
However, it’s worth noting that Carls Jr. isn’t the kind of brand that’s available everywhere, especially in the UK. The promotion also had a draw included, which means that even if you got a code, you might not get the prize you were looking for. A guaranteed reward like it’s available this time around is certainly better, and while the chance of getting super rare prizes like copies of the game or tours of the dev studio is huge, it would probably lead to the same problem as now, except with a chance to redeem your gray market code for a reward with no in-game value.
Ultimately, in the larger scheme of things, the main problem with the Burger Town MW2 skin promotion that has allowed this market to appear is a peculiar combination of literal real world region locking, with an absence of region locking. region when it comes to the codes themselves. It’s not yet known if the deal didn’t make it to the UK and US due to money or timing (these kinds of deals take months of planning), or if it was intentional to increase demand.
For now, people like Jay and Gabriel, those who have seen an opportunity to start a respectable business and earn some extra money for expensive hardware upgrades or to support their family, seem to be here to stay. With the official Twitter account of Burger King UK confirming the news that there is no planned Burger Town promotion for our sad little island, while the land of the free and unfathomable and unethical levels of military spending also sit in the same boat ironically without burgers.
If you’re looking for more Modern Warfare 2 content, we’ve got a guide on the Modern Warfare 2 Season 1 release date, as well as our best M4 loadout here!
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