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Valve Loses Australian Court Battle Over Steam (computerworld.com.au)
angry tapir writes: Valve Software has lost court action launched against it by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The Australian court case centered on the refund policies of Valve Software's Steam digital distribution service. Some of Steam's refund policies contradicted the statutory guarantees of the Australian Consumer Law, the court found. A hearing on penalties is yet to be held.
Such "false or misleading representations about guarantees" include: consumers were not entitled to a refund for digitally downloaded games purchased from Valve via the Steam website or Steam Client (in any circumstances); Valve had excluded statutory guarantees and/or warranties that goods would be of acceptable quality; and Valve had restricted or modified statutory guarantees and/or warranties of acceptable quality. Valve has contested ACCC's arguments on a number of grounds.
Such "false or misleading representations about guarantees" include: consumers were not entitled to a refund for digitally downloaded games purchased from Valve via the Steam website or Steam Client (in any circumstances); Valve had excluded statutory guarantees and/or warranties that goods would be of acceptable quality; and Valve had restricted or modified statutory guarantees and/or warranties of acceptable quality. Valve has contested ACCC's arguments on a number of grounds.
Oooops.
It's an attempt by corporations to rewrite/bypass existing laws, and prevent you from having any recourse by forcing you to agree to arbitration (conducted by someone friendly to the outcome of the corporation).
Despite the idiocy we've been seeing as courts (*cough* American *cough*) decide it's OK for companies to fuck over consumers with bullshit EULAs which skirt around the law, I'm glad to see some common sense.
Of course, expect the next round of "trade negotiations" (*cough* American *cough*) to work to undermine this.
Because, let's face it, America is all lubed up and on the payroll of multinational corporations.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Australia is on the right side of a video game-related story...
If they keep you from running a game you bought within the first 90 days, do a chargeback. If you own a bunch of Steam games, it might not be worth it since they'll ban you from playing the other games you paid for.
Just be glad they still allowed you to play the rest of the games you bought.
I dunno about you, but I like to have at least the minimum protection that the products I buy somewhat resemble what it says on the box, rather than simply being a box full of a picture of a duck in a funny hat. Because fuck you, that's why.
Did you even read the story or are you paid by valve to write this nonsense? You cant be completely retarded as you managed to use a keyboard so which one is it? Valve employee or didnt read / understand the issue of valve breaking the law and defrauding customers.
I dunno about you, but I like to have at least the minimum protection that the products I buy somewhat resemble what it says on the box, rather than simply being a box full of a picture of a duck in a funny hat. Because fuck you, that's why.
If you pre-order you deserve whatever you get, even if it turn out to be the watching paint dry game. I'm still amazed people do that. Otherwise - just read the reviews (not the bought-and-paid-for magazine reviews, of course, the player reviews),.
Still, I do have to wonder if this was an old case. I've gotten Steam refunds twice now "because fuck you, that's why" no problem at all. Is Steam's 2 week / 2 hours gameplay limit too strict for Aussie law? It's certainly worked well for me.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Thank you everyone. Thank you. I am honored.
This. If a first post comment was made on steam could they ban all games even purchased and paid ones?
Valve, Steam has 1800 titles and 35 million active users.
^^ from the article, seems a little low though.
This, might be a good idea to use multiple steam accounts to try and limit the damage.
And before people get on my ass, yeah, he fucked up by either cheating or breaking the rules, sure. No sense in banning him from singleplayer though, that's just insulting.
Probably won't happen anytime soon, but the shitfest that's going to happen when steam shuts down will be crazy.
But in practice I've had no problems with Steam refunds either.
Mind you I would have complained if I hadn't got a refund. (Game tagged Windows, OS/X, SteamPlay was windows only in practice)
More punny title: Valve Loses Steam in Australian Court Battle
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I like steam but this is good that the ACCC took them to court and won. Their refund policy is BS. I bought payday 2 ( http://store.steampowered.com/... ) when it had just came out for something like US$25 full price. I trusted the word of the developer who said it would NEVER have microtransactions ( http://steamcommunity.com/app/... ) in the game. Those scumbag developers then added in microtransactions anyway turning it on a P2W game. I tried multiple times through steam to get it refunded and each time I got a template response from steam denying the refund. If this was sold in the shops in Australia it would be ILLEGAL because it was not what I bought nor was it advertised as such to have microtransactions.
I will never buy a overkill game again.
Aussie statutory warranty variable depending on industry or product type but is never less than 12 months.
What I absolutely love about steam in particular is they grant themselves the right to "alter the deal".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Lets say you have spent a fortune on steam games.
They decide they are big enough they can do whatever they want and decide to start charging monthly fees or install spyware uploading contents of your computer to the New York Times or perhaps they just decide they don't want to support you anymore and unilaterally shut down the service.
If you don't like the new deal and don't accept it your account is shut down and you lose access to everything you ever paid for without any compensation or recourse. You of course also "agreed" to submit to binding arbitration.
This crap is why I don't play games anymore. It just isn't any fun when everyone has this kind of contempt for their customers trying to fuck people over asserting they don't own anything and have no rights.
So, the consumers were so disappointed by gaming on Linux that they are suing Valve? Wow!
After over a month asking in a support ticket for them to actually let me get into the store, I've realized that their "move the desk" policy is killing them.
There is no tech support.
There is no testing.
But there is a lot of "ignoring the problem" going on.
Stop investing in steam, start ignoring their games.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
We enshrined them (and all arbitration agreements) into the Rule of Law. Our highest court just rule the law was valid too.
Our schools are churning out lawyers like crazy because it's cheap for the University but expensive for the Student and our ruling class took note of a potential glut of people with the means to fire off Class Action Lawsuits. So they bought themselves a nice law. I suspect they're planning to do the same in the rest of the world if they haven't already (or don't just plain own the courts like they do in Brazil...).
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What do you expect from an OS where the sound won't work half the time? It's all about the peace and free software man.
So naturally the same standard applies to Microsoft?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
12 months to return anything for any reason? If you drink an entire can of soda, can you return the empty can? If not, then why would you be allowed to return a game that you potentially played to completion?
A multi-billion dollar corporation, with its attendant lawyers does not equal an 'unsuspecting foreigner'. Guess which one of those Valve is. If Valve wishes to do business in Australia (by selling products to hundreds of thousands of Australians, in Australia, to be used in Australia), then yes, they are expected to abide by our relatively consumer friendly laws.
Has to be unfit for sale to be returned under statutory warranty, and "fit for sale" is pretty broad.
The issue with Valve was they advertised that there were no returns for any reasons and didn't include the standard "except statutory warranties" disclaimer.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
It has to be as described and do whatever you were led to believe it would do. The term is actually "fit for purpose".
The other issue with valve is refusing to comply with the Australian consumer protection laws - refusing to give refunds for a nonworking product.
Further to this, the Australian laws don't automatically apply whenever you buy from somebody overseas, they only apply when the seller is targeting Australians.
Valve are clearly targeting Australians: they charge in $AUD, and they have special cut-down versions of games specifically to comply with Australian laws.
It had to be more than just some stupid things. Bans like than only come from abusive messages or serious threats. So as a TF2 player, I'm glad you and your little shit of a nephew got banned.
You let him play on your account, therefore you took responsibility for his actions. Don't let other people use your account, that's reckless and stupid.
If you drink an entire can of soda, can you return the empty can?
In South Australia, you can. You only get 10c back for the aluminium.
The answer to your question is "no", not for any reason. However, under Australian consumer law, there is no statutory limit on how long after purchase you can seek a remedy (e.g. repair, replace, refund) if it is not of acceptable quality. The only limit is reasonableness, and that depends on the product.
For example, if you buy a new car, and the manufacturer decides to stop making spare parts 15 years later (even if the initial warranty has expired), you may be entitled to a remedy, because cars are supposed to last longer than that.
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Magicka never ever worked on my computer despite it beating the system requirements in every category. (Stupid .NET-based XNA games.)
they charge in $AUD
No, they charge in US$.
Relatively friendly? They're downright draconian. They force the retailer (not the manufacturer or the importer) to assume all risk for the products sold. Even if they can recover the invoiced cost of the returned item, they'll never recover the time they spent verifying the fault, arranging the return, etc etc etc. It's part of the reason stuff is so expensive here. I'd gladly pay US prices for goods in exchange for just a LITTLE TINY BIT of caveat emptor. I don't think the "Australia Tax" is worth the "consumer bears zero risk" culture we endure.
Actually, the key part in the legislation is the product must be free from manufacturing defects for a "reasonable" length of time, which is interpreted according to the typical lifespan of that type of product, whether you paid more for a premium product, etc. There's no minimum or maximum period specified, but is rarely less than the manufacturer's own warranty period.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Nope, they charge a fictitious currency called Steam Dollars that you can get using AUD or USD.
I like the way Valve had argued that they weren't doing business in Australia and as such didn't need to comply because all they did was provide an online portal.
An online portal that accepts Australian dollars.
An online portal that will restrict titles for Australia by geolocation.
An online portal that WILL SEND YOU A CUSTOM VERSION OF A GAME FOR AUSTRALIA to meet Australian content requirements (looking at you Left4Dead 2) that was only released in Australia initially.
You can't argue that you're not doing business in Australia while at the same time creating (not even releasing but actually creating) specific content to comply directly with local requirements.
I stand corrected, prices are indeed in USD. Not sure why I thought it was AUD. Maybe I was confused with some other store - it's been over 2 years since I looked at the steam store - I stopped after filing a complaint with the ACCC about their failure to comply with Australian consumer protection laws.
But my other point stands: if they're selling a cut-down version of Left 4 Dead 2 to Australians to comply with our censorship laws, they're targeting Australians.
As one of the few people who actually read the Valve EULA: All of the parts of the EULA that tries to take away consumer protection has a little text on the end, something like "except as outlined in 13" (or whatever the number was).
Down near the end is part 13, which says something like "if you're in the European Union, you can ignore these parts".
With this court case, part 13 will have to be changed to "European Union or Australia".
I've gotten bans from games for doing stuff that was completely legit within the design of a game, such as killing people who were typing, spawn killing, camping and generally being a better player. Instead of getting mad, I just loop crashed their servers at random intervals. If they want to dish out bullshit, then I can return it right back to them.
How much is valve paying you to post here?
Relatively friendly? They're downright draconian
The post you're replying to said consumer-friendly. Which they are. They're only "Draconian" if you're a dodgy operator.
They force the retailer (not the manufacturer or the importer) to assume all risk for the products sold
No. Because the retailer is also entitled to the same protections.
But even if this were true, a good way to not run afoul of the laws would be to just not sell shit products.
The retailer is the only one the consumer has a contract with. It's the retailer who gets the consumer's money. So the retailer is the only one the consumer can hold responsible for fulfilling the contract or taking back the merchandise.
How much is valve paying you to post here?
Hah. I wish!!
But even if this were true, a good way to not run afoul of the laws would be to just not sell shit products.
Great, when you invent future vision so nobody ever sells products that turn out to be crap, let me know.
As far as I'm concerned, my contract with the retailer ends with them conferring on me clear title to the goods, and the release of any encumbrance.
Past that point, IMHO, the item is my responsibility. If it breaks, it's my job to find someone to fix it. If a manufacturer provides a service where they will repair the item during a timeframe, that would cause me to choose their product over a competitor's. If the product does not do what the manufacturer indicates it should do, then I bring civil action against the manufacturer making these claims.
By insisting that the retailer has some continued obligation to me past the point of sale, that suggests that they still have some ownership of the goods, that they don't truly belong to me, but I'm just borrowing them "until I'm really really sure". Screw that.
Only for those for whom an open door/unattended luggage/a car left idling are invitations to take, cheater.
I don't play on steam anymore but I'm sure those who do are glad you were banned.
If you return the empty can then you aren't returning the product, since the soda inside was the product and the can is simply the packaging.
There is no decent analogy because digital media is fundamentally different, not only could you potentially have completed the game but you could also have made a copy for yourself. That said, consumers still need to be protected - what if the game didn't work or failed to live up to the claims presented prior to sale? Consumers should absolutely have the right to receive the goods that were advertised, and thus a refund if the goods were not up to the advertised claims.
And yes consumers should be able to try something before they decide if they want to buy it, that's where brick and mortar stores come in - you can play the game in store and decide to buy it or not. For distance selling (ie ordering online, mail order etc) you can't do this, so the law in many countries provides for extra rights to give you an equivalent level of service.
One right people often forget in many countries, if you are returning goods because they are faulty or not as described then the supplier has to cover any and all costs (i.e. return shipping costs), many people don't realise this and shoulder the return costs themselves.
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If you buy a batch of foul eggs, would you try to figure out what farm they originally came from, or would you just return them to the super market you picked them up, showing the receipt for the proof of sale? Why would that be any different for any technical items?
Looking at the other comments on this, I see some pretty polarised views; either "corporations are evil, let me get a refund on anything I want whenever I want it" or "regulation is evil, let companies do what they want". I think both of those are missing the point somewhat.
The area of refunds for downloadable game purchases is one that a lot of effort has gone into over the last few years and nobody has yet quite found a solution that seems to work fairly for both the public and developers.
Actually, it needs to be acknowledged that things have moved on a long way from a couple of years ago. You can actually routinely get refunds now from the main online PC game stores, provided you meet specific conditions. What's not clear is whether this is down to the threat of governmental action (the EU had been making loud noises) or market forces. In particular, when EA startled everybody by announcing what was actually a fairly ambitious refund policy for Origin, it forced competitors like Steam to up their game and follow suit.
Steam's current policy is that, outside of exceptional circumstances, you can get a refund without question on a game which has been purchased within the last two weeks (or which has been released within the last two weeks if you pre-ordered) and which you have played for less than two hours. That falls short of the statutory provisions for refunds that apply in many jurisdictions, but it's nevertheless a useful protection if you purchase a game which doesn't work on your PC, is hopelessly bug-riddled or is fundamentally not-as-advertised.
But this system is causing problems of its own. In particular, a lot of small-scale indie developers, whose games only sell for a couple of dollars but whose play-time is less than two hours, are finding that people are playing their games to completion in less than two hours and then requesting refunds, despite having, in essenence, fully consumed the product. Guess what - customers can be greedy, exploitive morons too.
Now, you might argue - and indeed I would - that Steam would be a better place if it closed the door to a lot of these small-scale indie developers, or at least increased the barriers to entry. But encouraging them onto the platform and then shafting them through the refund policy benefits nobody.
I think part of the problem here is that for all of their many benefits, Valve remain resolutely awful at direct customer support and, indeed, seem to have no interest in resourcing it properly. Turn-around time for support requests, including non-standard refund reqursts, are abyssmal (and said requests often just drop into a black-hole). This means that when things go wrong either for a customer or a developer, unless you manage to get a twitter-storm on-side, it can be very hard to escalate a problem. Dealing with that and becoming better at processing those non-standard refunds (for instance, when a previously-working game is broken by a patch), might help with a lot of Valve's current problems. But that won't be cheap or easy for the company to implement.
Valve has contested ACCC's arguments ...
How do Australians differ from Americans? Australians don't believe:
Privatization is the answer.
Corporations have more rights than consumers.
Only the mega-rich can 'protect' our mediocre lives.
Corporations should be rewarded for obeying the law.
Corporate management is always devoid of criminal intent.
That can't be the only reason for the higher prices in Aus though, because we have the same retailer liability throughout Europe. Our prices are higher than the US, but mostly due to sales taxes. We don't have the same "Australia tax" that you seem to.
I dunno about you, but I like to have at least the minimum protection that the products I buy somewhat resemble what it says on the box, rather than simply being a box full of a picture of a duck in a funny hat. Because fuck you, that's why.
If you pre-order you deserve whatever you get, even if it turn out to be the watching paint dry game. I'm still amazed people do that. Otherwise - just read the reviews (not the bought-and-paid-for magazine reviews, of course, the player reviews),.
Still, I do have to wonder if this was an old case. I've gotten Steam refunds twice now "because fuck you, that's why" no problem at all. Is Steam's 2 week / 2 hours gameplay limit too strict for Aussie law? It's certainly worked well for me.
Steam's refund policy has been attributed to this court action from the ACCC. But, unfortunately for Valve, you will still get charged for breaking the law even if you follow them after the fact.
Australia has some very strong consumer laws and the ACCC rigorously enforces them. I am surprised that the current government haven't taken any steps to date to soften any of it...
One person's creative strategy is another person's exploit. Then again, many an exploit is obvious.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
It is impossible to be a cheater if a player performs actions that are allowed within a game. You just suck and need an excuse.
Just be glad they still allowed you to play the rest of the games you bought.
This. I can no longer play Half-Life 2 after my nephew said some stupid things in chat in TF2. I paid for the game. I should be allowed to play it!
Don't let other people use your account. That would have solved your particular problem.
If you were playing a Blizzard game, they could ban your entire account for letting someone other than only one of your legal children from playing a game that is on your account. It's called account sharing and violates the EULA.
If you own a bunch of Steam games, it might not be worth it since they'll ban you from playing the other games you paid for.
This is why one of the consumer protection laws we really need in 2016 but don't currently have in most jurisdictions is that businesses providing this kind of sales/distribution service have to treat each transaction independently.
It is clearly unfair for Valve (or your e-book seller, or a service providing movie or music downloads, or...) to attack a customer by retrospectively undoing other transactions or crippling other products involved in them just because one transaction was disputed or didn't work out properly in some way. If I go to a supermarket to complain because the "fresh" food they'd sold me with a use-by date some time next week had gone bad the day after I bought it, they don't get to refund me for that bad food but also make everything else I ever bought from them disappear from my kitchen. Tech firms doing the equivalent are just exploiting an imbalance of power and a controlling position in their market, not to mention abusing the kind of DRM schemes that allow that sort of control in the first place and the laws underpinning those schemes.
There are good reasons we regulate monopolies in other business contexts. We also regulate services in some important industries even though they aren't monopolies, because competition hasn't proved sufficient to keep the market balanced. As far as I can see, almost exactly the same arguments apply to a lot of modern on-line services today.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So you're so concerned about abusive messages that you feel the need to assume the worst, swear at someone, demean their family, and support action that effectively costs them money, despite presumably having no knowledge of the actual situation?
It's a good thing we don't ban people from Slashdot for abusive messages, I guess.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Probably won't happen anytime soon, but the shitfest that's going to happen when steam shuts down will be crazy.
Load client in offline mode. Check interblogs for cracks for everything you have installed. Game on.
You were being a jerk, not a better player. Jerks often don't realize that being a bad person is their primary characteristic.
Here's the deal. Know that any company that implements mandatory binding arbitration (Steam is one of them) is run by scumbags and trust nothing to do with them. Normally I'd say don't buy anything from them, but typically companies that go for arbitration are near monopolies/oligarchies, and steam isn't all that much different, though perhaps less aggressive about it than your typical monopolist.
Once you realize that, you realize that Steam won't care about screwing you over. Treat all transactions with them as disposable, "ALL SALES FINAL", and you'll be much happier.
1) We're American!
2) What? That's like communism!
3) But it's on the internet!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is Steam's 2 week / 2 hours gameplay limit too strict for Aussie law?
I think that's too strict in general. The problem is it's not 2 hours of gameplay, it's 2 hours of having the game open. I might easily spend 2 hours trying to get a buggy game to work. This can be especially problematic with games that use their own download/update system rather than distributing their payload via steam, since Steam would track that time where the launcher is open, downloading the game/updates.
Especially seeing as how TF2 is a free to play game you can get by signing up an account.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yep. If someone comes to me and complains that they lost their license due to speeding the first reaction is not that they were actually innocent and it's a big misunderstanding.
Likewise here knowing a bit of history the number of cases where people were wrongfully banned from Steam and the ban wasn't quickly resolved is almost nothing, so the smart money is on guilty until proven innocent.
You can, buying from an offshore vendor bypasses your consumer rights (i'm not even sure you have whatever rights you would have had in the vendor's home country)... This only applies if the vendor has no presence in your country and doesn't market the product in your country, or they do and you intentionally buy from a foreign supplier instead of the local one.
If the vendor has a presence in the country and/or is directing marketing at residents then those people have no reason to believe they wouldn't be protected by local consumer protection laws, whereas someone who is intentionally making the choice would be fully aware and that's the difference.
Another problem is that companies often intentionally try to mislead consumers, because many simply aren't aware of what rights they have under consumer protection law. I have often had arguments with companies over this, where they intentionally don't inform the lower level staff (ignorance or lack of training isnt illegal but intentionally lying to customers is) and you have to get escalated to a manager in order to assert your rights.
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The consumer deals with the retailer, not directly with the manufacturer, they already have contact with the retailer and it might be difficult for them to contact the manufacturer... This also comes from the days when the retailer was a physical entity based locally to you, while the manufacturer could be anywhere.
Those laws prevent the retailer from passing the buck and washing their hands of any responsibility, and provide (in theory) a local and convenient point of contact for the customer to deal with and get their complaint resolved.
And you can pay US prices - import the stuff yourself, you lose the consumer protection - you will only have whatever warranty is provided in the US, and might have to send the product back there at your own expense if it's faulty.
It's also not zero risk, it's severely reduced risk which overall probably increases sales - if users were more worried about receiving faulty goods and have no recourse they would be less likely to buy and certainly wouldn't want to buy online where you can't test the product before you buy it.
Most of europe has quite tough consumer protection laws too, it's not just australia.
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Likewise here knowing a bit of history the number of cases where people were wrongfully banned from Steam and the ban wasn't quickly resolved is almost nothing, so the smart money is on guilty until proven innocent.
What do you know that I don't? As far as I know, there aren't any published figures on this kind of thing from a reliable source, and there have been enough reports of Valve doing obviously inappropriate things that I wouldn't necessarily assume they were in the right as you seem willing to do.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, aside from the fact that a lot of the game content - in effect, multiple entire classes, and occasionally even strict upgrades - is only available if you've got the various drops/unlocks. Even if you bought the game, back when it cost money, you may not (in a very real sense, separate from the DRM thing) own the (whole) game if you haven't been playing enough to have the latest gear.
I don't give Valve money anymore. I don't agree with their business practices, and I don't consider convenience an excuse for abuse of their position.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
No you didn't. Vac doesn't ban for anything like that and you know it. This and the GP are obvious trolls.
Same AC here.
Have you spent any time on TF2? You don't get banned for the normal trash talking that we've all come to expect from teenagers on these things. At most that'll get you muted, or kicked from a single server. "Normal" levels of abuse (and it saddens me that that's even a thing) get dealt with by server admins, and they don't have the power to ban you from accessing a whole game franchise.
Actually getting banned from a whole game requires getting escalated up to the steam account investigators. That pretty much requires some serious levels of threats, like threatening to find and harm someone in the real world. The kind of threat that would get you arrested if you made in person.
As for why I feel the need to swear at someone and demean their family? Given what I've just told you about the level of abuse required to get banned from a game, go back and re-read the guy's comment : "my nephew said some stupid things in chat". What does that tell you? It says he doesn't think his nephew did anything wrong. So he's condoning it, which makes him a shit too. Also "I paid for the game. I should be allowed to play it!" suggests a feeling of entitlement. He feels his money is worth more than the feelings of whoever was the real victim in all of this.
I get that free speech is important, but it's not the only right people have, and you have to remember that TF2 isn't the commons. It's a market place for digital hats, run by Valve. If someone comes in there pissing off the other customers, that costs Valve money. Why do you think this abusive shit's right to speak overrides Valve's right to make money in their own market?
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. The issue with Valve's chargeback policy isn't so much anti-competitive, but as a means of dealing with fraud. I'm in no way defending them, and I think they deserve all the hate they get for these practices, but I thought some context would be useful to understand what exactly is going on.
The PCI industry has been on Valve's tail for the past couple years about people buying giftable/tradeable games (and items) with stolen credit cards, and they're really struggling to curb it. Mostly in-game items from Valve's own games, but also giftable games. There's a LOT of money in "carding" by purchasing these games or items, then quickly reselling for PayPal at below Valve's price, leaving the grey market purchaser to worry about what happens when the cardholder disputes charges on their statement. By a LOT, I mean for some career criminals the trade of games/items has become a viable way of laundering money in the thousands or tends of thousands of dollars at a time. Valve has just short of shut down trading with various "cooldown" restrictions such as making items/games untradeable for 15-30 days after purchase, required confirmation from a mobile phone running their app to "confirm" each trade, and region-locking Steam gifts, but scammers are still gaming the system, with each disputed charge resulting in fines against Valve and the ever-increasing threat of losing their ability to accept VISA/Mastercard/AMEX as payment in their "ecosystem". These microtransactions are also a HUGE part of Valve's revenue, so shutting it down completely is not very viable, plus the more legit trading community is pretty large so doing so (after people paid hundreds or thousands) would cause a lot of backlash.
This would be less of an issue if Valve had decent customer support, who might fairly handle requests to refund games or support customers with issues, but in their lateral no-leadership corporate hierarchy of maybe a couple hundred employees in total, with almost everyone a developer, it's really hard to get anyone to actually handle customers' problems instead of writing scripts and macros to automate the 10,000-something tickets they receive each day. Hence, you get a seldom-monitored forum, and an online ticket system, with no way of contacting speaking to a live person by phone or even email, and average response (which is usually scripted) taking 1-2 weeks, sometimes as long as a year.
With no avenue to resolve issues with purchases, customers are left with little option but to contact their banks and request chargebacks, which the payment card processors count against Valve all the same. Remember that Valve will do anything it takes to keep those negative marks at a minimum. With chargebacks on the rise, and Valve STILL unable to handle this "Support thing", and fraudsters (who also backlog their customer support) certainly not willing to stop, their next best solution to keep the number of chargebacks down completely suspend accounts involved in chargebacks. Once you dispute any charge with them, your card is blacklisted, and any accounts it was ever used with are suspended, meaning all your games are gone. Not wholly effective against scammers, but it's the best they have. When/If Steam Support ever responds, you are required to make contact with your bank to reverse the chargeback, and clear Valve's name with the PCI (absolve them of the PCI fines and clear this black mark from their record with the payment processor), or all accounts the card was used for will remain deactivated, with access to every game you ever purchased held hostage. Problem is, as you might imagine, many times someone's credit card number gets compromised, meaning their perfectly legit account gets caught in the crossfire because some scammer in the Philippines racked up a bunch of charges on a brand new account to launder money with. From their perspective, you should have resolved the bogus charges with their (non-existent) customer support so they could handle the issue internally instead of getting dinged for fraud.
tf2 isn't pay-to-win. they've done their best, and a decent job of making all individual things side-grades and not pure upgrades. and the drop rate is good enough that you can usually craft any weapon you've gotta have any way.
you do not need to pay additional money to unlock any of the non-cosmetics you're looking for. unless you're classifying the cosmetics as a core part of the experience... in which case i think we're talking two different "games"
the point being, everything is unlockable with minimal effort except for purely cosmetic items.
Maybe you're right. I don't use Steam so I have no personal axe to grind either way. But you have to admit that some things about the OP's situation as they reported it do sound dubious to an impartial outsider.
That pretty much requires some serious levels of threats, like threatening to find and harm someone in the real world. The kind of threat that would get you arrested if you made in person.
If those threats are serious, then why aren't they being reported to the actual police? That sounds like a pretty toxic environment that has gone beyond what any commercial organisation should be trying to control themselves.
Given what I've just told you about the level of abuse required to get banned from a game, go back and re-read the guy's comment : "my nephew said some stupid things in chat". What does that tell you? It says he doesn't think his nephew did anything wrong.
Maybe that is what he thinks. The thing is, maybe he's also right. I don't know, and based on this Slashdot discussion alone, I don't see how you can know either. Online forums are notorious for over-reacting to criticism of their own preferences and culture. Maybe Valve's are no exception.
Also "I paid for the game. I should be allowed to play it!" suggests a feeling of entitlement.
Well, yes. He paid for the game. So he's entitled to what he paid for. The thing that is very dubious about the setup some organisations, again including Valve, have adopted is that they can and demonstrably sometimes will revoke things someone already paid for, even if those things are completely unrelated to whatever is in dispute.
He feels his money is worth more than the feelings of whoever was the real victim in all of this.
But since we only seem to have one person's anecdote that's been jumped on here, it's hard to know who that real victim was, or whether there was even any serious injury to feelings at all. As I said at the start, if there was something as serious as a credible threat to find and hurt someone, Valve should have backed off and called in the actual police. If it's just some teenager mouthing off unpleasantly, sure, ban that account from whatever forum was involved, but I don't see how that justifies kicking someone off a different game they already paid for.
If someone comes in there pissing off the other customers, that costs Valve money. Why do you think this abusive shit's right to speak overrides Valve's right to make money in their own market?
I have no problem with some reasonable process that ultimately bans someone who's being seriously abusive from whatever forum is involved.
What I do have a problem with is Valve, or anyone else, thinking their right to make money in one context means they don't have to provide the fundamentals someone already paid for in a completely different context. I see no legal or ethical basis for such a broad response, and far too much scope for abuse.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's a single player game! Why would any other players care? Cheat at solitaire all you want.
Unfair, but given the massive devoted fan base that Steam has who will loudly defend it at every turn, it's going to be very difficult to get Valve to change their strategy and play fair.
It's Valve, not a court of law. There is no due process allowed, just one employee pushing a ban button with no appeal. Valve is not a paragon of virtue who should be implicity trusted by thinking they must have had a good reason for it.
That all sounds perfectly reasonable, except for the part where they completely and dubiously legally cut off a genuine customer from everything they paid for. As far as I'm concerned, they should lose the resulting court case, and as compensation for damages they should have to pay the total price someone would have paid for the entire set of games at the normal current rates since their own system will generally tell you what the market value of those games is.
I'm actually a little surprised that the card schemes let them get away with this. The terms for accepting card payments are usually absurdly one-sided from a merchant's point of view, and trying to artificially prevent justified chargebacks is generally frowned upon in the industry. I very much doubt Valve is big enough to have custom terms with the likes of Visa and Mastercard, but maybe they are playing along in the recognition that Valve is still significant and genuinely trying to reduce card fraud.
In any case, we're talking about a company with in the region of a billion dollars in annual revenues. I get that they have a certain culture and it's popular with geeks, but I'm utterly lacking in sympathy for them if they can take that much money from customers yet can't manage to provide a decent customer support operation, just as I am when certain other tech giants do actually get taken to small claims court over a dispute where they clearly haven't been reasonable and then they do actually lose the case.
Of course the ideal solution is to do away with the entire crazy card payments system we rely on in a lot of countries today, which is insecure and fraud-ridden by design, imposes crazy terms on merchants as a direct result, and is generally a barrier to reasonable people doing reasonable things and paying each other reasonably for them without someone taking on unreasonable risk as part of the deal. But we're literally talking about organsations that make economies work in some of those countries, so change is going to be painfully slow.
I don't personally buy Steam games, or use other services with a similar kind of set-up, because I consider this situation an unacceptable risk. I'm far more likely to spend my money with the likes of GOG, where I pay a fair price for a game, and then once I've got my copy it's mine, lock-in and DRM-free. But in other business contexts where I've had software companies try to mess me or my businesses around in similarly their-mistakey ways, I'm afraid I'm rather black-and-white with them these days. I'll make a reasonable and polite effort to contact whatever customer support mechanism they have, and I'll play along if they seem to be reasonable and polite in return and making effective progress towards fixing the problem. However, if they start to give me the run-around, they get a registered letter straight to their official address, which coincidentally also starts the formal small claims legal process in my country (which their lawyers know, so almost always that step is where they wake up and actually take the problem seriously enough to fix it). I'm sorry if they have problems with being unable to track stock or product registrations properly, or with their commercial relationships with financial services they work with, but time is worth too much to let those become my problems instead for their convenience.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Remember that Valve will do anything it takes to keep those negative marks at a minimum
Except for complying with Australia's consumer protection laws, you mean.
Some of us paid or TF2. It wasn't always free to play.
> Is Steam's 2 week / 2 hours gameplay limit too strict for Aussie law? It's certainly worked well for me.
IIRC that was only brought in recently, after the ACCC started this case.
Great, when you invent future vision so nobody ever sells products that turn out to be crap, let me know.
It's really not that difficult: you test products before you sell them, and you don't overstate your claims about how capable they are. Also, you can look at the number of returns you've had compared with the number you've sold and get a failure rate from that. Based on this, you can make your claims more accurate.
But, again, as a retailer, it's not a big deal, because you can just return the defective products to the manufacturer you bought them from, since you're covered by the same consumer protections. Something from my previous post which you seem to have completely ignored.
Just grab the torrent for "Half-Life 2 3in1". It's HL2 with both episodic add-ons and no Steam spyware shit.
You can also probably find cracked servers to play TF2 on, just like there are cracked servers for L4D/L4D2.
No, I was playing the game according to its own design and inherent rules. If you weren't meant to be killed while typing, then the game would make you invincible while you have chat bubble up. If you weren't meant to be killed as you spawn in, then the game would give you a brief moment of invincibility when you spawn in. If a game weren't mean for camping, then it would injure or kill any player that stood around for too long (but of course you'd cry about that too as you died while standing around chitchatting in the middle of a warzone).
Whiners like you can't compete and have no recourse other than to cry to the admins because you suck so badly. Maybe learn to play the game instead of being a crybaby because admins who are lame enough to actually listen to your little tantrums pay the price by having their servers lagged and/or crashed repeatedly.
They do charge Australian specific prices though....
besides which, you're not buying from the manufacturer or imported, you're buying from the retailer. It's the retailers job to make sure what they're selling is good enough and meets the rules on quality and reliability. At least in civilized countries it is. Caveat emptor is bad.
What does that have to do with his nephew signing up for an account rather than using his account?
I got TF2 with the Orange Box, that doesn't mean it isn't free now.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This, might be a good idea to use multiple steam accounts to try and limit the damage.
And before people get on my ass, yeah, he fucked up by either cheating or breaking the rules, sure. No sense in banning him from singleplayer though, that's just insulting.
Probably won't happen anytime soon, but the shitfest that's going to happen when steam shuts down will be crazy.
Hmmm.. that's certainly true for multiplayer.. but with single player, if it ever happened, and you knew ahead of time that they're going to fold,, surely you could set it to "off line" .. As I understand it.. it's not time limited. And maybe an enterprising hacker could make it permanent. They'gve already hacked Steam games to do that.,. I see them offered all the time on warez sites.. Which.. ahem... I don't frequent .. I see them psychically ;-)