‘This isn’t it’ – community reacts to controversial plans for Rocket League trading to be removed

Psyonix has announced plans for player-to-player Rocket League trading to be removed, and the community have responded in force.

Rocket League – developed by Psyonix, which is owned by Epic Games – announced: “Player-to-Player Trading will be removed from Rocket League on December 5th at 4pm 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.”

UK Rocket League player Rise responded with a sarcastic post to the Rocket League trading removal, saying the devs are ‘killing the game even more’, while many others also expressed their dissatisfaction with the plans.

The original post by the official Rocket League account has racked up almost 7m views on social media platform X in just over 24 hours.

UK caster, host and content creator Gregan added: “Do what’s best for the game, do what’s right for the community… This isn’t it.

“I can’t help but feel this decision was enforced by someone who doesn’t know what is right for Rocket League, which is a more scary premise for the games future than this decision itself.”

UK Rocket League player Slumpii writes open letter to Epic Games CEO over Rocket League trading changes

Another UK Rocket League player, Slumpii, who plays for Endpoint’s women’s team, wrote an open letter to Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney in response to the Rocket League trading news.

“I urge you and everyone at Epic to reconsider this decision,” Slumpii said. “Trading is a core feature that everyone uses and nobody asked for it to be taken away. For a lot of people, this was the final straw due to the lack of meaningful updates to the game in recent years.

“The negative effect this decision will have on the game and community will be vast, and is only compounded when other factors such as lack of communication and recent layoffs are taken into account. Please reconsider, thank you.”

Esports News UK reached out to Slumpii to ask if this was a collaborative letter, as it ended with, ‘signed, the Rocket League community’.

Slumpii told us: “I actually didn’t write it with anyone, but I read pretty much every response content creators, pros and players were giving to the post, both on Twitter and Instagram. Nobody was for this change, every single comment was negative, which has never happened before. Thats why I felt comfortable enough addressing that message from the RL community as a whole – and I think thats why it popped off as well.

“I’ve never ever seen the community this united on something. It’s crazy how epic probably didn’t think anything of it either.”

The community backlash to the Rocket League trading plans has been huge. Could Psyonix and Epic announce a u-turn? They have made changes based on feedback in the past. For example, in early 2022, after the Rocket League community questioned stricter tournament rules around player age and LANs, Psyonix made adjustments based on this feedback.

The news comes a couple of weeks after Epic Games announced it’s laying off 16% of its workforce – around 830 people. This affected multiple businesses including UK Fall Guys dev Mediatonic.

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.