In the virtual world of Fallout 76, Gun Runners are making thousands in real-world cash
For some reason I’m rapidly accruing a collection of dumb stories about my time in multiplayer games – and seeing as the Rust murder tale went down so well, I thought I’d recount another. This time it’s about my brief foray into the world of Fallout 76 virtual gunrunning, which has since escalated into a detailed look at the life of the traders making serious bank from selling Fallout 76 items. I don’t know how I ended up here.
Back in January, when the first wave of Fallout 76 backlash was at its peak, vast swathes of the Fallout subreddits were busy complaining about in-game glitches – and in particular, a cheating method called duping. It’s a process by which players exploit a bug to duplicate items, with potentially game-breaking consequences if uncontrolled numbers of top-tier items suddenly flood a community and upset the balance. It’s a phenomenon witnessed in other online games, but for Fallout 76 it was perceived as a serious problem by the community – with Bethesda constantly playing whac-a-mole trying to patch out new glitch methods as they appeared.
Over on eBay, some enterprising hustlers capitalised on the mess by creating their own cottage industry. Using the various duplication methods, the eBay accounts started selling dozens of Fallout 76’s most valuable items. Fallout 76, of course, doesn’t sell guns in its Atomic Shop on account of Bethesda’s pledge to avoid pay-to-win microtransactions (although some argue it’s already broken this pledge) – which means there’s a market for gameplay-affecting items such as weapons and armour (and the raw in-game money and materials to acquire these). Then the secret dev room was discovered and unreleased items started appearing – a problem that hasn’t quite gone away, judging by some recent listings.
At the time, I’d already started investigating the item duping, as I was intrigued by how this worked. Who were these people? How did the gun delivery process work? And how had they avoided being caught? I then got a little sidetracked by the sight of those unreleased items and Wooby, so I never got around to talking about Fallout 76’s real-money trading market.
Except, I’d already purchased one of the guns.
It didn’t take long to find. A simple eBay search threw up a bunch of options for every platform – and faced with an abundance of choice, I searched for one that looked as overpowered as possible. “Two Shot Explosive Light Machine Gun (2star) (for Fallout 76, PC)” sounded like it would work. It set me back £7.75. The next step in this process was to contact the seller with my Discord name. I can happily report the anime-avatar eBay seller had excellent service: within hours, a Discord friend request popped up and they introduced themselves.
“hello 🙂
“im currently delivering an item to another customer, you’re the next in line so will be available right after im done with him 🙂
“sorry for the delay.”
Not only incredibly polite, the seller also seemed to have a full delivery schedule. It was a level of professionalism I wasn’t prepared for, and I hurried back from my lunch break to arrange an in-game meet-up.
After a small struggle to add each other as friends, I was instructed to join the game world and fast travel to the seller’s location. They’d chosen to set up shop at Charleston Station – a sensible choice, given it’s typically one of the earliest locations players find in the game. The stations are always fairly enemy-free, and heavily populated by players seeking to access the vendor, stash box and workbenches there.
This didn’t stop the transaction from feeling a bit shady.
As I approached the station, I could see the seller gesturing at me to come over. Entering cautiously, in the gloom I could see them squatting in a dingy corner, gesturing towards a rickety old end table, in which I found my gun. As the glorious weapon whirled around my monitor, the seller gave me a thumbs-up, and momentarily forgetting where the emote button was, I performed the universal gaming symbol to express gratitude: jumping. And there it was, my very own illicit gun.
If you want to see all of this play out in real time, you can, because I recorded it. (Apologies for the keyboard clacking away in the background – I left my mic on.)
Fallout 76 – Buying a Gun From eBay and Collecting it Watch on YouTube
Feeling a little dirty after the transaction, this is where I left this story for several months – until recently, when I revisited Fallout 76 to check out the new Fallout 1st subscription. Then, I started wondering to myself: who are these people selling virtual guns on eBay? Is it actually a viable side-hustle?
