PUBG Corp. has recently announced that they are temporarily disabling all person-to-person Steam trading to halt third-party sales of PUBG items. Typically, players are able to either purchase items on the Steam marketplace or trade items amongst one another (as is standard across many Steam games). However, following the change, items will only be purchasable from the Steam market. Users will no longer be able to trade them amongst one another. PUBG Corp. spoke out on some of the specifics.

What PUBG Corp. is actually hoping to stop is being removed as a middleman from profits. Through the Steam marketplace, developers and Steam make a small percent of all trades – usually around 3%. If users are making deals outside of the Marketplace and then trading items to one another, they circumvent the tax that Steam and PUBG Corp. would be taking as additional profits for themselves. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to look into shutting down – they certainly have a right to make money – it does feel like making extra money shouldn’t be their largest concern with trading.

Despite coming under recent fire from the Netherlands for illegal use of Loot Boxes, PUBG Corp. has made no moves to alleviate the issues found within their trading system. The Netherlands ruled that so long as Loot Box items could be sold or purchased with real money, PUBG would be in violation of Netherlands law. As of right now, Loot Box items can be obtained via the Steam marketplace or from third-party vendor sites, meaning both cases are violations of the law. Disabling only trading among players, therefore, would not help solve the problem that many governments see within their system.

What is also points to is a business out-of-touch or uninterested in the current climate. Like Star Wars Battlefront II, PUBG needs to start listening to what its community – and the world at large – is tell it. Right now, governments are swooping in to attack Loot Boxes, and game developers are being scrutinized ever more frequently for unethical profiteering from trade systems. It hardly seems like the best time for PUBG Corp. to be worried about losing money from trading between players.