Animal Crossing: New Horizons players are selling items on eBay and you shouldn't do that

(Image credit: Nintendo)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons already has a thriving online grey market, where sellers are offering items, recipes, and stacks of bells all for real cash.

New Horizons is the most online-friendly Animal Crossing game to date, and certain enterprising players are using those multiplayer features to sell their goods and services. I won't link them here for reasons I'll explain in a bit, but if you take a quick scroll through eBay you'll see in-game merchants offering to sell you rare delights like every flavor of Star Wand or Animal Crossing: New Horizons Golden Tools. The bell selling market is also quite competitive.

While it isn't possible to sell the items directly through eBay, merchants typically offer to either deliver their goods to your island or invite you to their island to pick up your order. There would be no in-game recourse if they tried to scam you out of your money. You could always leave them a bad eBay review and try to get their merchant account sanctioned, though.

The problem is that this is all a big violation of the first section of the Nintendo Switch End User License Agreement: "The Software is licensed, not sold, to you solely for your personal, noncommercial use on the Console. You may not publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the Software".

It's fine if you run a little online market where you sell your friends Golden Tools for bells. But if you do it for real money, you've already given Nintendo the right to shut you down. A Nintendo legal squad probably isn't going to kick down your door, put a bag over your head, and carry you away to Binding Arbitration unless you're a big-time seller - but they might ban your Switch Online account.

You don't need to hit up eBay to make progress in the first seasonal event, just check out our Animal Crossing: New Horizons Bunny Day guide.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.

Latest in Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing's "obscure references" were all "localized out completely" before its debut in the West, as Nintendo felt it needed to "change everything"
Anime Life Sim
After unsuccessfully attempting to launch a Monster Hunter clone, this controversial dev is now supposedly releasing an Animal Crossing-like game on PS5
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp trailer screenshto showing a chibi-style female character with bobbed brown hair, a yellow flower atop her head, and a chef-like top, smiling with her arms out
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp's new paid version has finally arrived and is microtransaction-free, but fans already miss the old app
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp trailer screenshto showing a chibi-style female character with bobbed brown hair, a yellow flower atop her head, and a chef-like top, smiling with her arms out
As the free-to-play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp prepares to go offline, Nintendo reveals more on the paid replacement - including its $20 price tag
Galactic Getaway
This multiplayer life sim is like Animal Crossing in outer space with Mario Party minigames, and it's just what I needed this Steam Next Fest
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp trailer screenshto showing a chibi-style female character with bobbed brown hair, a yellow flower atop her head, and a chef-like top, smiling with her arms out
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp players blast "greedy" Nintendo as new items roll out despite the game's imminent shutdown
Latest in News
Balatro
Balatro creator started "properly playing the game myself about a week before launch" and had "a pretty emotional moment" where he realized it's "actually fun"
Death Stranding 2 Collector's Edition
Hideo Kojima reveals Death Stranding 2: On the Beach release date, and the Collector's Edition includes exactly what I predicted it would
Kingmakers
Kingmakers is a strategy game about taking on medieval armies with a gun, but its devs thought the giant mech was too much
The Witcher 3 lead says "not many games" were trying to match the RPG back in 2015, and that meant "there was a risk" to making it in the first place
The Blood of Dawnwalker
The Witcher 3 dev says his new vampire RPG Blood of Dawnwalker wants to challenge genre conventions, but only if "we're changing them to actually achieve some goal"
Daredevil recap: The Defenders
Marvel fans are discussing which of the Netflix series characters would have survived the Blip