Player-to-player trade’s removal from Rocket League was the decision of Epic Games after acquiring the dev studio.
Sometimes it is better to find whether an online game is active by looking at its economy. It is known that if the economy of the said online game thrives, the game is doing exceptionally well. For example, Counter-Strike 2, despite being changed from Global Offensive, still has a lot of people waiting in line to purchase keys, cases, weapon skins, and cosmetics off the market and trade those items to someone else for other goods.
For a very long time, Rocket League had the same route when someone wanted to get a fancy car or a cosmetic for their car: buying or trading. A player had to either buy cases and keys and get lucky, or trade some of their items for a better one with someone else. Now, nobody has had a problem with the trading system so far, but despite the serenity of the trading community, Psyonix, the developers of Rocket League, announced that they are ditching the player-to-player trades in December.
The decision ultimately led people to feel frustrated and ask why such an important part of the game was being canceled right out. The story is surprisingly tied to one of the biggest gaming companies, Epic Games. Back in 2019, Psyonix was acquired by Epic Games, and since Epic Games did not have a dedicated trading system on their launcher, they slowly started to delete a few elements from Rocket League, such as being able to buy keys to open boxes.
Boxes came already opened, but you had to pay with premium currency, which meant you had to directly fund the Epic Games instead and purchase currency from Epic. Since Psyonix is now under the roof of Epic, they have to obey the change. The removal of player-to-player trade will happen on the 5th of December; until then, players need to be quick on trading their items away for other goods.
It is sad to see one crucial part of the video game it is known for. The other games with trading enabled have their fair share of dramas and scamming alerts pop up from time to time; however, we never heard of something bad happening to Rocket League’s trading scene. Therefore, making this decision a bit too harsh on the game.
