PUBG Tries to Reduce Market Prices with Longer Wait Times

Like all online games, there’s a pretty large and thriving marketplace for PUBG cosmetics, which can be sold over on Steam for dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of dollars: which is a lot to pay for an item that’s only going to be enjoyed by the guy who sniped you six squares away and decided to loot your body on the way out of the blue zone. Now, you’re allowed to spend your money however you want, but when you combine an online marketplace with crappy loot boxes (the kind that PUBG has), you have some level of accountability to try to minimize abuse.

PUBG’s solution has been, so far, to disable item trading to effectively shut down the gambling websites that inevitably exploded following the game’s brief moment in the spotlight. But since the prices of rare items is still kind of out of control, their next attempt to level things out is to add even more extreme waiting periods between the release of a crate and when those items can be sold.

Because that will help… somehow?
 

"Previous crates (like the Equinox Crate) were unmarketable for a shorter amount of time, but we’ve seen this cause somewhat abusive behavior of the market system—especially in the form of jacked-up prices for rare items. We believe that implementing slightly longer market restriction times will help alleviate this issue. Thanks for understanding! We’ll keep you updated as we continue to make improvements to our market rules and systems."

Maybe the logic is that if the wait is longer, more rare items will be found in the creates, so they’ll be worth less. Which is… an idea? But it’s also kind of creepy because it means players will have to go through PUBG in order to get the items, which just lines their pockets even more.

So… that’s a thing.