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Steam Fined $3 Million For Refusing Refunds (smh.com.au)
Gaming company Valve Corporation has been hit with a $3 million fine after the Federal Court found its online games site Steam breached Australian Consumer Laws. From a report: The court imposed the maximum fine requested by Australia's competition regulator because of Valve's disregard for Australian law and lack of contrition. Valve's general counsel, Karl Quackenbush, told the court the company did not obtain legal advice when it set up in Australia, and did not check its obligations until the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission got involved in April 2014. It only provided staff verbal instructions. This lack of interest in Australian laws and lack of cooperation encouraged Justice James Edelman to impose a pentaly 12 times more than Valve Corporation suggested it pay.
Pentaly.
What kind of idiots are the people running this company? Do they actually think they're running a Mom and Pop store?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Seriously editors, what's a "pentaly"?
This is just more government meddling in the affairs of a business. For a country lead by supposed conservatives I'm surprised they would take such an anti-free market stance here. It should be Valve's choice on how it deals with refunds, and consumers are free to decide whether or not they can live with it. Gaming is not a necessity nor a right.
Hillary told Steam that when she was elected, they didn't have to refund any money, ever. She also said they could replace all their staff with H1B's.
Steam forgot to adjust their refund policy when Trump won. Hopefully they haven't started replacing their staff yet.
Tegel is a bastard working for Wikimedia tell him how much of a bastard he is.
I'm sure they are devastated. Steam makes that in 29 minutes on average this weekend.
How could ANYONE be stupid enough to not check local laws when opening in a new COUNTRY? I see that Valve is privately held, and apparently the owners aren't really very good at the detail work on things like this.
I've said before that you can't run a company only by listening to lawyers (and quite frequently you need to ignore them when they get too protective), but that doesn't mean you don't need them at all!
I applaud Australia for levying a fine high enough that someone will perhaps notice and wish to avoid a repeat.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Small fact check: this is $2.15million in USD.
But yes, idiots.
"During the case the court heard Valve did in fact offer more than 15,000 refunds if a customer was unable to install a game, or unable to play it, or where a subscriber purchased the wrong version of a game by mistake."
So WTF are Aussies fining Steam $3M? Because they can't beat Pac-Man?
Unless Valve has branches in Austrailia, I wonder how they intend to collect the fine if Steam decides not to pay up?
Any country with laws not inline with ours are just backwater dictatorships.
Who do our companies need to freaking read up about their stuff. That's like asking us to read a few hundred country's laws and these shitty dictatorships would probably have consumer protection laws in their traffic laws just to make us pay.
If they play punch with us we should just stop trading with them and see what happens to their economy.
These assholes are biting the hand who feeds them.
If the fine is too high, Valve will just pull out of your country to avoid paying it, and you'll be stuck with Origin. Their customer support is run by EA - and that's about 2000x worse.
Did people finally get their refunds? And what exactly constitutes a valid reason for a refund? Broken? Feels broken? Incomplete? Feels incomplete? Got swept up in a sale and over spent? Games aren't consumables, they don't wear out. So why isn't there a 2 or 4 week buyers remorse period? If a game is good it has enough replay value or enough content to last more than a month.
The fine goes to the government, right?
So when businesses do something bad to me the government gets the money?
In other words, government is more important than people.
Socialism is very much a part of what Nazism was. One of the things about the Third Reich was that it was a statist, government controlled industry. Difference b/w the Third Reich and the Soviet Union is that while the latter believed in 'Internationalism' and world communism, the former blended German nationalism and Aryan racism w/ Socialism, making the latter unrecognizable
To determine whether Nazism was a Leftist or Rightist movement, just look at whether they believed in limiting the size and scope of government. Answer is a huge 'NO'. They were big believers in big government, but since Communists were one of the groups that they decided to persecute, nobody ever recognized them as being Left Wing
Companies often try to use licenses and agreements to get around laws. It can be amusing when they find out that this doesn't actually work. The laws specifying the circumstance where a refund is required are very simple and not unreasonable. A customer that just changes their mind has no legal right to a refund. A product that does not live up to the claims there were made by the seller, is defective or not fit for purpose must be refunded. A truthful seller has nothing to fear.
The ACCC regularly goes after companies for breaches of Australian corporate law and $3M is not a big fine when you consider Steam refused a lot of refunds where it was legally required to give a refund. Only weeks ago a drug company was fined $6M over misleading claims. Individual offences can be up to $10M per breach.
In Australia it is actually an offence for seller to put up sign stating that no refunds are give under any circumstances.
When it comes to software being fit for purpose and living up to the original claims there are extra complications compared to a physical product. An update that changes functionality so that the original claims are not met or that makes the software no long fit for purpose could leave the buyer with a right for a refund. It might not be a complete refund, depending on the time it was in use and actual changes but it give sellers something to consider. Again, an honest and truthful seller that does not screw their customers has nothing to fear.
Thanks for this, now can you maybe do something about the companies breaking games permanently by shutting down DRM servers? The US certainly doesn't seem to care.
No one's saying an MMO company has to keep the game running till the end of time. But for games with single player mode there's no excuse.
Irrelevant. The Nazi governments, repealed German Citizens rights, shutdown the constitution with the 'Reichstag Fire Decree' and threatened those who opposed the legislation with the SS and the SA. The Socialist democrats that you are demonizing are the only Germans who stood *against* Hitler. Case in point is that under these regimes left wing opponents like union and community leaders were rounded up and put in concentration camps by right wing fascists who bought us history like the mass murder of Jews.
That you bring up Mussolini, the very template of right wing fascism that believes that any form of liberal democracy should be replaced with totalitarian one party martial government, shows the vapid little thought bubble you have had, has burst. Go and learn some history instead of trying to re-write it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Amazing. People forget Steam is a defacto monopoly now. They have no real competition. The last disk I bought just had a steam code on the disk, and the steam installer. When they mislabeled the minimum requirements for a game and left out that it did not run on 64bit Win 7 it took three weeks for them to tell me to sit and spin. They are not consumer friendly. You click no to the newly updated subscriber agreement and your library is locked. They could put in their that they have the right to use rabid sheep to bite off your ear and you agree or lose $1000 worth of software. Enjoy:)
Australia is a third world Internet, fuck them all to death the heathen plebs are unworthy of joining the PC master race.
Oh! This is why.