OPSkins Confirms Steam Account Closure Won’t Disrupt its Business

Fans of the OPSkins platform were recently subjected to a bit of a rude awakening. With Steam threatening to remove this service from the platform and shutting down the associated Valve accounts, a very harsh tone was set. The OPSkins team has issued an official explanation as to what is going on and where things will go from here.

The Future Of OPSkins Looks Interesting

As is usually the case when announcements such as this one are made, there are some misconceptions that need to be clarified. First of all, Steam will indeed disable the accounts belonging to OPSkins, which is somewhat unfortunate. However, any rumors regarding OPSkins shutting down are clearly false. Nor is Valve suing this company, even though the OPSkins team received a communication from one of Valve’s legal staffers. It seems the project’s team members expected Valve to take such a harsh course of action sooner or later, which further indicates this development will not disrupt the service all that much.

Perhaps the most important question is whether or not OPSkins’ customers’ funds are safe and accounted for. That seems to be a non-issue right now, as all of the funds deposited and money earned through item sales are fine. The money resides in individual accounts belonging to users, rather than with the operational funds of the company itself.

Another question a lot of people want to see answered is whether or not OPSkins can continue its operations in any meaningful manner. The team is confident that decentralized peer-to-peer trading of in-game items is still the right way to go. As such, the WAX platform built by the same developers will facilitate a shift to peer-to-peer trading in the months and years to come.

Moreover, the company is confident that its ExpressTrade feature is not going away either. Although it is that particular aspect which forced Valve to close OPSkins’ Steam accounts in the first place, the feature itself will remain accessible. This decentralized solution will let players trade with one another without any intermediaries. It runs on top of the WAX blockchain and will be open source as well.

Indeed, it seems the future of both WAX and OPSkins is looking pretty good, all things considered. Although the Steam suspension is a big setback, Steam was never part of the team’s long-term vision, by the look of things. Supporting a trading economy for in-game items beyond the ‘Steam Era’ will prove quite interesting.