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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just wait until the EU comes after them. EU law states all software can be resold, including digital only. Strange that Valve, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Sony still won't offer a single method for doing so, therefore breaking the law as there is no mechanism to bypass their DRM. Seeing as these massive global tax dodging corporations are the gatekeepers for the keys, and no one else can transfer them, they cannot deny they are not preventing private sales.
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.