Sometimes developers have to make choices unpopular with their own fans to keep their games viable.
Psyonix has made a surprise announcement about Rocket League, that has had fans furious.
In a new post on their website, Psyonix said:
“Player-to-Player Trading will be removed from Rocket League on December 5 at 4 p.m. PST.
We’re making this change to align with Epic’s overall approach to game cosmetics and item shop policies, where items aren’t tradable, transferrable, or sellable. This opens up future plans for some Rocket League vehicles to come to other Epic games over time, supporting cross-game ownership.”
Basically, Rocket League will now be following Epic’s policy of having no trading system between players. Such systems may be great for the fans, but they can also enable the launch of third party markets and auction sites for these items, that the game developer has no direct connection to.
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There will still be a trade-in system in the game itself, that will allow players to trade in duplicates or unwanted items for better items. Players can still do trades until the end date, but whatever trades were made after the December 5 deadline will essentially be final.
Of course, even if the game company has good reasons to shut down player trading, there will be fans who will be unhappy with these changes. We don’t know how unanimous this sentiment is at the moment, but the people who disapprove, are very vocally upset about the change.
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The idea that Rocket League’s cars can be carried over to other games doesn’t sound like it was intended to be a tradeoff. It sounds like Epic and Psyonix were already working on that feature, and decided to just tie it up to this pending change.
Video Games Chronicle noted the many angry reactions, but this one is noteworthy for reasons the commenter did not intend. cyne_wave said:
“This is the worst decision any game could make.
Do you not know what Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 have built with their item markets? Trading is what spawned an entire subgenre of this community.”
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Now, what cyne_wave may not have realized is that Valve have themselves just immolated Counter-Strike’s item market with the launch of Counter-Strike 2. While Valve worked on transferring some items over from Counter-Strike Global Offensive, they went forward with publishing Counter-Strike 2.
Some fans may argue that these changes are anti-consumer, but the developers have to consider many factors to keep their games healthy and popular. That can include seemingly counterproductive and unpopular decisions like this one.
