I tried to build CSGO Lounge for PUBG

I'd spent years trading CSGO skins on CSGO Lounge and loved it. When PUBG blew up in 2017 and there was no equivalent for its cosmetic items, I figured I'd build one.

PlanetPUBG was a full item trading marketplace built in Rails. Players signed in through Steam, the platform automatically synced their in-game inventories, and from there they could create trades, search for matches, and negotiate in comments.

The trickiest part was keeping the item database fresh — I built automated scraping tasks that pulled item info, images, and pricing data from Steam's API servers, distributing requests across multiple endpoints to dodge rate limits. The backend worked well, but my design skills just weren't there at the time and it didn't inspire the kind of trust a trading platform needs. It was a good lesson in how much presentation matters, especially when you're asking people to exchange things worth real money.