Modded Borderlands 4 guns and equipment are being sold on Ebay with tailored gun parts and effects. However, as of writing, it doesn’t appear this grey market of modded loot is particularly profitable.
Ebay – a public e-commerce marketplace – is no stranger to gaming related side hustles, with numerous account, cosmetic, and service sellers setting up camp there over the years with the release of popular online video games. Eurogamer reached out to one Borderlands modded gun merchant to find out how it’s going.
“It is fairly difficult to do as they have included a new encryption method to the guns this year that makes doing specific builds very very hard and will take, I would imagine, a long time to get perfected” states one Borderlands modded weapon reseller to Eurogamer under anonymity.
This new encryption method implemented by Gearbox not only makes the act of modding the exact weapon you want difficult, it’s also making prospects of profit for resellers unlikely due to the cost of getting the decrypted values for weapons people will actually pay for. When asked how successful business is, the seller told Eurogamer:
“Not very successful. I’ve sold maybe three or four since release, which is around £15 to £20, which doesn’t even cover the costs to build the guns, but I don’t do this to make money or profit.
“To make the modded guns you often need to pay for tables that data miners have made that breakdown gun parts. Each part of the gun has an encrypted value, so does the rarity, manufacturer, level etc and the tables can be expensive to buy at around £50 to £100.”
As such, at the moment, it appears that the grey market for selling modded Borderlands 4 loot is more for the hobbyists rather than those looking to make a buck from a hot new release (unless you’re a data miner able to sell off valuable info, rather than the sought after weapons themselves).
Whether or not this will become a great problem as time goes on, and more of the game’s loot encryption is broken down and made publicly available, remains a potential problem for the future. Although as a PvE game, the modded gear seller made an argument for why the practice of modding isn’t doing any harm:
“Borderlands games have always been modded and I’ve modded them since Borderlands 1 and every game in between. It’s a huge part of why I love the games so much.”
