Many of you might already have heard that Epic Games / Psyonix will remove “Player-to-Player” Trading from Rocket League on December 5 at 4 pm PST, Psyonix announced yesterday.

Psyonix’ reason to remove player to player trading reads as following:
“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 change will bring Rocket League into alignment with "Epic's overall approach to game cosmetics and item shop policies, where items aren't tradable, transferrable, or sellable," according to Psyonix.

RL Garage was not aware of this change. We didn't get a warning before anyone else and only learned about it the same time as anyone else.

It's not just traders who’ll lose big with this change. Content creators like jonsandman advertised all new cosmetics in Rocket League whenever they were released, giving Psyonix free marketing. Their tools are now taken away.

It’s the tournament organizers who often give away items to the winners of their tournaments.

It’s the kids that can’t afford overpriced items from the item shop that now have to play Stocktane forever.

It’s the generous people who ran countless giveaways to give back to their community.

It’s the community developers like us who spent years and lots of money to create tools for the community.

All those players who cared so much about cosmetics will turn their back on Rocket League in December.

While one could argue that trading isn’t the core part of Rocket League, we still think this change might negatively impact the game in the future

The trading community will be gone, which makes up a lot of the casual player base. This will result in less players playing the game. Popular YouTubers – who constantly advertised the game for free – might move on. Possibly making their viewers move on as well.

Less players also means that Esports orgs could be less interested in Rocket League resulting in decreasing viewship of the big tournaments like the RLCS.

We don't know if any of this will happen, but we'd be sad to see Rocket League changing this drastically.

Trading makes up about 90% of the usage of the RL Garage app/website. While we also offer lots of other features like our car designer, the item database, a ranks & stats tracker and the item shop page, this has a serious impact on our way forward. RL Garage is funded by ads and premium subscriptions, which will plummet as soon as people stop using our trading section. We don’t know if 10% of the revenue will be enough to keep RL Garage running as we still have to pay for the servers and still have something left for us, the developers.
We will stop working on RL Garage, as this has been our full time job for quite a while now, and this change will make it impossible to continue doing so. We lost our jobs today, but more importantly, Rocket Leauge players lost a very consumer friendly way to build their dream car in Rocket League.

We're very thankful for Psyonix allowing us to do this for such a long time and we always ha/a very good relationship with them. They even helped us improving it by giving us access to APIs and data and Psyonix even offered to purchase RL Garage in 2017. We love Psyonix, but disagree with Epic Game's decision to remove trading entirely.

We will remember the 6 million people signing up for an RL Garage account. We will remember the CEO of Psyonix, Dave Hagewood, congratulating us in 2015 right before our website launch. We will remember many developers from Psyonix joining our website to play Fantasy RLCS over multiple seasons. We will remember Ted loving our Car Designer (You'll be missed dearly, Ted). We will remember Psyonix adding our logo into the game as an Antenna.

We will try to keep the existing version of RL Garage running as long as the costs for servers are less than our income from ads.

We will also release one last big update we’ve been working on for more than a year soon. This update is already being tested by beta testers and enhances the platform outside of trading section. After that, the platform possibly might not receive any significant updates.

Tell Epic Games how you feel about this decision. Use the hashtag #FreeRocketLeague on social media to make your opinion about the trading removal heard.

If you want to help RL Garage please consider turning off your ad blocker or purchasing Premium for the remaining 2 months.

Honestly this has been quite the ride and all of our lives have been changed for the better as a result of RL Garage, so from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for choosing RL Garage over the years. We hope you will stick about beyond December 5th, but let’s just see what the future holds. RLG out.

Update: We've removed a paragraph where we misinterpreted that Epic Games calls all 3rd party trading websites "fraudulent".