In blog post today, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds developer PUBG Corp. announced that they are temporarily shutting down personal trades within the game due to misuse of the trading systems.
Up until today, players could perform a ‘Marketplace Trade’ or a ‘Personal Trade’. Trading on the Steam marketplace allows players to add to their Steam wallet by selling their in game wares to other interested players. This means that all of the money stays within the Steam ecosystem and is, theoretically, more controlled. A personal trade was supposed to be just that – a trade between two friends for no monetary compensation.
Of course, it is hard to stop people from selling their in game content on a third party website, getting the money through other means and then performing a personal trade within the game. It is a loophole in the system and one that apparently PUBG Corp. is not happy with.
“Recently, though, we’ve seen a few cases of players using the personal trade function to sell items using third party sites. This is essentially an abuse of the system. To prevent this, we’re temporarily turning off personal trades while we search for a better solution,” their post reads.
This particular issue is one that a lot of competitive online games are familiar with, with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 developing thriving third party marketplaces for rare items. With the popularity of PUBG and all of the special loot crates and weapons skins they drop for players, it is a huge target for just that type of entrepreneur.
There is no set date on when PUBG Corp. will restore these features, with the post simply stating “once we figure out a way to prevent abuse, the restriction will be lifted.” Until then, players will have to stick to the marketplace or keep their items to themselves.