Over $1 million worth of skins for Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds were lost when the biggest online trading site was effectively shut down in its current form earlier this month.
Over $1 million worth of skins for Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds were lost when the biggest online trading site was effectively shut down in its current form earlier this month.
OP Skins, the biggest skin trading site online, had huge marketplaces for games like PUBG and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Skins would change hands for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars using Steam marketplace trading bots.
Valve had had enough of the site, however. On June 9 the developer sent OPSkins a cease and desist letter via Twitter, saying that Valve would shut down the site’s accounts on June 21. True to their word, the trading bots were taken offline last week.
But OPSkins hadn’t cleared out the inventories on its trading bots before the shutdown, meaning tons of skins were lost. For PUBG, nearly one millions items are now gone forever.
Reddit user “IAmNotOnRedditAtWork” used Steam’s API to access the data of exactly what was in the inventories of the bots that were taken offline.
The PLAYERUNKNOWN skin set was the biggest loss among the bots. Between the coat, bandana, and whole set, over $225,000 worth of skins from that set were lost. Over 33,000 GAMESCOM Invitational crates were also among the cosmetics that are now gone. The most valuable skin lost was the Olive Branch pan skin, worth over $1,700. Two particularly sad players lost out on that.
In total, the Reddit post values the total losses at $1,018,486.58. For CS:GO the losses were much greater, with over 1.5 million skins lost at a total value of nearly $2 million.
Update: July 4 2018, 4:20am CT: This story has been updated to make clear that the website OP Skins is not shutting down. OP Skins told Dot Esports that it intends to continue offering a platform for skin trading through a new blockchain-based platform.
