Rocket League players have started marching on the war path against Epic Games-owned developer Psyonix Games, which confirmed this week that player-to-player trading will end on December 5th. “We’re making this change to align with Epic’s overall approach to game cosmetics and item shop policies,” the announcement explained. “This opens up future plans for some Rocket League vehicles to come to other Epic games over time, supporting cross-game ownership.”
Despite the long lead time before trading is turned off and the fact that trades before this point won’t be affected or rolled back, players of the vehicular sports title are incensed. The game’s subreddit and the associated announcement thread are full of angry posts, spicy memes, declarations of quitting the game, calls for an end to microtransaction purchases in protest, and multiple references to a tweet from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in which he says “companies should state their principles up front.”
The backlash has also spilled outside of social media, with players opening a petition to keep player trading intact, which has received over 10,000 signatures at the time of this writing. “Let’s not add any meaningful updates for years. But when we do, we should try to kill the game,” one player sums up.
Epic Games laid off and spun out a combined total of over 1000 workers last month, insisting that it was “continuing to invest in games with Fortnite first-party development, the Fortnite creator ecosystem and economy, Rocket League and Fall Guys.” Thus far, none of those games has been entirely unaffected by Epic’s financial woes, as Fall Guys’development staff was hit by layoffs and Fortnite raised the price of V-Bucks.
