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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Suspends Personal Item Trading
Trading items from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds outside of Steam marketplace has been temporarily halted, PUBG Corp. announced today.
Item trading in Battlegrounds can be done two ways, with an option for listing the item on the Steam marketplace and one for trading ostensibly between friends called Personal Trading. PUBG Corp. announced today that they would be suspended the latter option due to a discovery that third party sites were being used to facilitate personal trading.
When trading is done on the Steam marketplace, a percentage of the sale is given to the game PUBG Corp. The money also goes into the Steam wallet, to be used on other Steam products, keeping it in the ecosystem. PUBG Corp. wants to avoid players take their items out of the ecosystem, especially since these items have real world value outside of the game.
PUBG Corp. has said that they will turn personal trading back on once they "figure out a way to prevent abuse" from using third party sites.
Our Take
There's probably not a good solution for this, because the entire idea behind creating cosmetics in the game is the idea that trading will bring in extra passive income for the developers. In that sense, it makes total sense to not want third party sites horning in. This is probably the only thing they can do about it.
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