PUBG Disables Item Trading to Prevent "Abuse"

You get a popular enough game, give it some dope cosmetics that can be earned randomly but traded between players, and you’ve got yourself an underground marketplace. Plenty of games have fallen into that trap, spawning gambling sites and player-based black markets where skins and items can sell for thousands of dollars. Fortunes gained, fortunes lost; all because someone really wanted a custom weapon skin or a stupid-looking hat. If there has ever been an argument against the excuse that cosmetics aren’t a big deal in games, that would be it.

Recently, PUBG’s underground, third-party marketplace has grown a bit too out of hand, and now BlueHole has made the decision to temporarily prevent players from trading items with each other.

The reasoning behind the decision shouldn’t be hard to comprehend:

Some context: Normally, players can trade items using either the "Market trade" or "Personal trade" features. "Market trade" lets you sell items through the Steam market system. "Personal trade’" is supposed to allow friends to trade items without any costs attached.

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.

Third-party websites are not only unregulated, which means people can buy and sell for wildly inflated prices, but they’re also unsafe, and putting any kind of personal information on those sites, such as credit card or steam account info, could be extremely risky. So it’s less that it personally hurts PUBG when you don’t use the Steam marketplace, and more that you hurt yourself. It also helps stop whatever gambling sites might have been running on PUBG. So it’s a good thing to do, but understandably there will be people unhappy about it.

PUBG ended the post by saying once they figure out how to prevent abuses, the item trading will return.