ARC Raiders Players are Buying Blueprints on eBay

If you’re a gamer, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve already taken a look at ARC Raiders. Embark Studios’ unique take on an extraction shooter launched in late October and quickly took off, with hundreds of thousands of players logging in and shooting each other every day.

The game takes the form of an open-world, freeform, PvPvE extraction shooter. Players are incentivized to scrounge through scrap heaps, crumbling buildings and derelict vehicles for all kinds of loot. By scraping together enough bits of plastic and wires, you can even craft guns and grenades to maim other players with.

But first you need to find a blueprint, and that can be pretty difficult. There are currently 66 different blueprints in ARC Raiders, and the odds of finding any one in particular is completely left up to RNG.

Rather than spending hours hunting and pecking for a particular recipe, some players have elected to open their wallet and skip the grind by purchasing ARC Raiders blueprints on eBay for real money. An entire market has emerged, with some sellers making dozens of sales every day.

Most of these are selling for just a few bucks at a time, but we have seen a few sales for over $50 at a time, usually for the rarest and most popular guns and gadgets.

But it doesn’t end there. Aside from the general crafting blueprints, a second market has emerged among ARC Raiders players. A few days ago, Embark Studios revealed some additional requirements and details for the game’s “Expedition”, an in-game feature that wipes your progress and creates a new character

Even unlocking the Expedition requires hours of grinding and hoarding hundreds of items. The Expedition rewards scale based on the amount of loot you’ve stockpiled, but achieving the full benefit requires a truly herculean level of scrounging to achieve.

Additionally, the ARC Raiders Expedition window is only available for a limited window from December 17 to December 22. Players are scrambling right now to get everything they need before the chance passes them by.

So it’s not too surprising to see some gamers attempting to skip the grind by simply buying the materials they need with real money. In a world where microtransactions and progress skips are baked into most games from the whiteboarding phase, players are simply reinventing the concept from first principles.

Some accounts are offering to simply sell you the 5 million coins required for the Expedition, while others are just listing high value items and sellables to pad wallets.

This is of course not a new concept. MMOs like World of Warcraft and RuneScape are notorious for massive player-driven black markets, where valuable accounts and items can trade for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

ARC Raiders’ loot-central gameplay and sudden thrust into the gaming zeitgeist made this kind of situation inevitable. If you’re an avid player that’s been stockpiling loot for the past few weeks, keep in mind that you could actually make some real world profit by listing it for sale online. Just remember that you’ll have competition.