PUBG Skin Traders Just Lost An Insane Amount Of Money After Trading Site Shuts Down

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Valve and PUBG Corp. recently took a major step to crack down on illegal skin trading within games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, shutting down a major trading website called OPSkins. In doing so, however, hundreds of players lost an insane amount of money in in-game items, totaling more than a million dollars. Hopefully, this serves as a good lesson for folks who choose to ignore those pesky end user license agreements.

Over on Dexerto, they're reporting that more than a million dollars in character and weapon skins have now been lost following the closure of OPSkins, specifically from PUBG. This report comes from an impressive amount of legwork done by Reddit user IAmNotOnRedditAtWork, who broke down a timeline of the website closure and even a rundown on the items (and their dollar value) lost.

The items lost run the spectrum in terms of quantity and dollar value. There were 380 PUBG Bandanas up for grabs at a price of $267 a pop, for instance, totaling $101,585. On the far more extravagant side of things, two accounts had The Olive Branch Pan listed at $1,781 each, while one player had a female Military Uniform Set on sale for $772. To be clear, some items were on sale for as little as $0.3, so it isn't like everything was insanely overpriced.

In the end, the research concluded that a total of 964,243 items were officially wiped out, totaling $1,018,486.58 in value.

In recent years, Valve has come under fire because in-game trading on Steam has allowed for gambling sites to pop up and take advantage of the system. In short, players would "trade" their content to these sites and then use them to bet on the outcome of events. If you won, you would have your bet and whatever items you won traded back. Some folks would skip that process though and simply sell their skins for whatever value the community decided they were worth, typically based on rarity.

In order to help solve this problem, PUBG Corp recently disabled in-game trading within Battlegrounds. Taking this action without much in the line of warning, though, meant that all those items noted above were effectively locked on the OPSkins website. By comparison, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players were warned that the site would soon be shut down and players were given some time to remove their in-game items from the service. Now that OPSkins has been burned to the ground, all of that PUBG content has gone with it.

Given the nature of the website, it's hard to feel a lot of sympathy here. OPSkins was engaged in illegal activity and players who used the site for gambling were equally guilty. Sure, it would have been a courtesy if PUBG Corp. gave players a warning before cutting off in-game trading, but it's hard to blame them for protecting their game and focusing instead on the players who were not engaging in those activities.