In the ever-bizarre world of gaming, where virtual items sometimes sell for thousands of dollars, one Steam user has silently amassed quite a collection of something really wild: 13,000 copies of PUBG: Battlegrounds’ black combat pants.
Every piece of those pants is worth around $0.03 on the Steam marketplace, which might be the total value of the horde were they to manage to sell them all.
GamesRadar+ first published a story about the user’s profile, which is now just solid black and holds one item only but this enormous inventory of black combat pants. Unsurprisingly, the internet is inquisitive.
Why Would Anyone Hoard 13,000 Pairs of Pants?
The profile was stumbled upon by Reddit user killmissy, who then posted the profile along with the attribute of confusion: “What’s going on here?” The explanations led from confusion with the bots or weird economic schemes to the straightforward definition of meme.
It is regularly seen in online games that users collect rare items, for example, a Team Fortress 2 hat was just recently sold for $40,000, but stacking up 13,000 plain trousers is far not a typical collector’s behavior.
Profit? Maybe. Logic? Not So Much.
Selling each of the 13,000 pairs would be a long and tedious process, and even if every single one of them was sold for $0.03, the total profit would be really low per transaction. Redditor Killer22250 jested, “He will own them all, and then he will sell them for millions,” which of course was hyperbole, still he made a good point: the black combat pants are in abundance.
The way to make money on the Steam Marketplace often lies in the decision of perceptive traders to aim at unopened crates, which imitate the “loot box” concept and are therefore excellent gambles for the buyer. With combat pants, there is no surprise. You get what you see.
The Philosophical Angle: Why Not?
As a Reddit user marcus_lepricus very nicely points out: “Pants are a renewable resource. There’s still fresh supply entering the market.” Trying to make the highest profit on an item dropping that keeps appearing is the problem—it is as impossible as trying to possess each grain of sand on a beach.
So maybe it is not economics that is the sole and strong driving force. Maybe it is a joke overly gone. Maybe it is a joke that was actually meant for robots only, a bot gone wild, or perhaps a person who just finds a collection of a ridiculous number of digital pants the funniest thing of all.
In the End, It’s Just Pants
The real plans of intentions of the mysterious Steam user are still unknown. It’s possible that they’ll be among the people that nobody remembers. It’s possible that in the future, the color of the combat pants will be only black, and they will become the rarest item in PUBG and in this way, the very last user will be able to laugh at it.
They will surely not be left in peace, because as long as they stay as they are, as a quirky footnote in gaming lore, digital pants barons with no clear motives and an incredibly responsible dedication to… whatever this is, there will be users who will continue to comment on them.
