PUBG Skin Traders Lose an Estimated $1 Million Worth of Items on OPSkins

Calum Patterson

PUBG players who had skins stored in trading website ‘OPSkins’ have reportedly lost a total of $1 million in value, after the website was targeted by Valve to crackdown on CS:GO trading.

PUBG Corp. actually disabled item trading on Steam, to prevent the growth of skin gambling websites which have caused controversy particularly with titles such as CS:GO.

While this prevented the skin trading websites from profiting from PUBG skins, players’ items were still secure and so their money had not gone to waste.

However, when Valve recently targeted OPSkins to essentially shutdown CS:GO trading, but also affected some inventories with PUBG items too.

While CS:GO skin traders were given a grace period to withdraw all their items, PUBG players were unable to do so because of the earlier restrictions imposed by PUBG Corp.

Despite requests to have the restriction temporarily disabled to allow players to withdraw their items, PUBG Corp. upheld the rules, meaning the items were permanently lost as part of Valve’s crackdown.

Reddit user u/IAmNotOnRedditAtWork explained the timeline and calculated the total loss at $1,018,456.58, the full details can be read below.

Timeline

  • On May 3rd, PUBG Corp “temporarily” disables trading on all PUBG items without warning, trapping 964,243 skins in OPSkin’s bot inventories.
  • On June 9th, Valve announces they will be banning all OPSkins trade bots by June 21st.
  • Later on June 9th, OPSkins releases an official response to the incoming bans, urging users to withdraw all of their skins before the June 21st deadline given by valve.
  • PUBG Corp has between June 9th and June 21st to lift the trading restrictions on their items to give their users the option to withdraw their skins before the bans went in place, but choose not to.
  • On June 21st, as expected, Valve applied trade-bans to all 2,880 of OPSkins’ trade bots.
     
    I was curious just how many skins were lost due to this situation, so I wrote a program to pull the full list of OPSkins trade bot’s inventory URLs from their steam group (here), and then use Steam’s Web API to pull the exact inventories of each of these bots, and add up the quantities of each item. From there I took the lowest current sale price listings for each item (which have actually dropped significantly since the bans on June 21st) and calculated the total value of each item stuck in the inventories of these now banned bots.
     
    Here is the full list of items that have now been effectively deleted from the game.