Bazaar.tf

» see bazaar.tf as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

My own counter-strike years were 2002 to 2005 in Turkish internet cafes, where you paid by the hour and owned nothing at all when you stood up. By the time a Valve game shipped with an inventory worth haggling over I was almost thirty and had a job, so I read about the hat economy rather than trading in it. What I recognize anyway is the kind of person who runs a site like this for eleven years without charging anybody for it.

Team Fortress 2 grew a real economy out of cosmetic hats, and by 2011 the place people went to list what they had was TF2 Outpost. Two developers who went by Fiskie and Accell decided they could build something better and started TF2Bazaar, which went public around June 2012. The stated aim, written down ten years later in the site's own anniversary post, was a more advanced trading site and a competitor to Outpost. Outpost closed in 2018. Bazaar was still trading in 2023.

The site let you post an ordinary trade or run an auction, and it operated its own bots so a Buy Now listing could complete while the seller was asleep. Over the years it picked up Dota and CS:GO items alongside the TF2 ones. What it never did was hand the whole process over to automation. Every other serious trading site eventually turned into a vending machine where a bot priced your item and took it off you in four seconds.

Bazaar stayed with two humans typing at each other. The anniversary post from 2022 is blunt about it: bot trading is cool too, they wrote, but they would rather preserve the kind of trading they started with. It cost them volume on purpose, and they kept the rule for eleven years anyway.

~ the case file ~

~ the first goodbye ~

On 6 July 2018 the operators posted an announcement titled "bazaar.tf : this is the end, my beautiful friend". It gave a schedule. New trades would stop on 1 September 2018 and everything else would halt on 1 December, with the forums dropping into read-only mode on the same day. There was a fourth line against 31 December reading only "[Information redacted]". The post also contained four words that turned out to matter: "Is this the end? Maybe!"

It was not. The site kept serving full pages right through 2019, was still running when the pandemic arrived, and on 20 June 2022 posted "A decade of madness (happy birthday Bazaar)" signed by three staff and a list of everyone who had ever moderated it. The closing line of that post reads "c u in 2032 for the next one".

~ the api that won ~

Steam trading runs on an API that Valve maintains for its own purposes, and third-party sites live or die on how reliable it is. A DDoS outage on 25 June 2023 forced an access challenge onto the front door. A month later, on 27 July, came the post titled "This is goodbye my friends and fools".

It blamed the API directly, and said the rewrite that might have worked around some of it was a colossal task they had no way to finish. "11 years man. This is the most painful announcement I have ever written." Also, between the Rocky quotes: how many sites with much better structure and financial support we outlived. The banner that went up on the site named the date, shutting bazaar.tf down for good on August 3rd, 2023. The last full crawl of the working site is 1 August. By 4 August the crawler was getting a 2 KB page.

~ the page that is still up ~

That 2 KB page is still being served today. It is a gravestone graphic, the Bazaar wordmark, and two links: one labeled "what happened?" pointing at the Steam announcement, and one pointing at a successor called crystal bazaar, run elsewhere by other people. Somebody has now renewed bazaar.tf three years running in order to keep a headstone online.

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