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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
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.
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.
It is a penalty, which is divisible by five.
"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?
It's when you get screwed over five different ways.
Not quite... closer to about 2 days, actually, so still making it back over a weekend, but not in just half an hour.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Also, let's be fair, the typo is a direct quote from the article.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Also, let's be fair, the typo is a direct quote from the article.
Yeah well, Sydneysiders. 'nough said.
There is no class north of the border. (and go one notch further north and there is even less class. Unless you count pumpkin scones)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Unless Valve has branches in Austrailia, I wonder how they intend to collect the fine if Steam decides not to pay up?
What do you call a penalty which is a prime number?
FATALITY
Actually EA's support is way better than Valve's. You actually can immediately reach a person rather than open a ticket and wait weeks for it to be responded to.
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.
Actually EA's support is way better than Valve's. You actually can immediately reach a person rather than open a ticket and wait weeks for it to be responded to.
If only EA's software was so reliable... or they bothered to support more platforms. You talk about Origin as if it's actually a viable alternative.
Besides, you're exaggerating how slow Steam's support is anyway. I've actually received refunds (past the normal 48-hour mark even) on Steam within 36 hours of requesting them. I've never needed technical support for a first-party Valve game, but admittedly I have not recieved stellar support from third-party developers. As for games that actually work, I can play most of them on Windows and Linux, and I don't have to have Internet Explorer to even open a Valve launcher; Compare this experience to Origin, which isn't supported on anything but Windows, and often zombifies until you kill its process even on Windows... or to EA games like Battlefield 4 that I can't even open the launcher for unless I install the bIggEst trojan horse in human history.
Of course, there is no commercial store that can offer the level of support I've received for my Linux distro; I can't hop on IRC and expect Gabe Newell to send me a patch to fix the problem in 10 minutes. I guess I've been spoiled. Lol
Perhaps, but you are still talking about a difference that is over an order of magnitude in size. Half an hour fits into two days 48 times.... I would be skeptical that their profit margins this weekend are *that* much higher than they are typically over an average 2-day period.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
D'oh! math fail. 96 times.
Realized it just as I was clicking "submit".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Which border are we discussing here?
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.
While the AC is obviously a troll, there are some aspects of this ruling which seem a bit odd. For one, Steam was called out for not having "minimum quality guarantees." How exactly do you DEFINE "quality" for a video game? Do Australian laws really require this of all vendors...so that if you buy a book from a bookstore, and don't like it, you can say it had "poor quality," and get your money back? (Or, more to the point, you can claim that it had "poor quality" and get your money back even though you liked it?) Why is Steam the one that would have to be accountable for enforcement? Steam is a distributor.
The way business operates these days, it's unrealistic for a distributor to be held directly and solely accountable for maintaining quality standards on all products. Imagine Amazon having to test everything for quality...and keep testing, lest that quality change over time? Just setting standards for "quality" across things like books, movies, games, TV shows, sex toys, crafting supplies, etc....an impossible challenge. Testing against those standards? Incredibly difficult. And for what, an economy of 23 million people?
Add to that the fact that while a bit more than 21,000 tickets were opened that contained the word "refund" (not the best standard for determining how many refunds were warranted, mind you), Steam offered over 15,000 refunds. To me, this is a company that IS giving out refunds. And going further...how many of those tickets had a phrase like "if you can't fix this, I want a refund," only to have the problem fixed? How many of those were duplicates? How many of them didn't take the next step provided to start the refund process? How many of them were situations where a refund simply wasn't even warranted?
General Counsel for Steam was stupid not to get legal help when doing business there. He was even dumber to act like that was no big deal. But yeah...this ruling seems a bit excessive, if only because the laws there are nuts.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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.
Socialism is very much a part of what Nazism was.
No, they were Fascists. And in fact, the primary opposing Party to the Nazis were the Socialists.
Go study History.
Difference b/w the Third Reich and the Soviet Union is that while the latter believed in 'Internationalism' and world communism
People may have called them Communists, but they were Socialists. Which is why USSR contained the word Socialist, not Communist. From a very general viewpoint, the difference is that Socialism is when the Government tells you what you own, and Communism is when you just flat out don't own anything.
A big problem with trying to discuss this kind of thing is that there also differences between the Political, Economic, and Social versions of various -isms. For example, some of them have identical Social policies but different Economic models, while other are very close Politically but very different Economically. And those three categories can end up being blurred together quite a bit as well.
Seriously editors, what's a "pentaly"?
It's when you count up all the pens you have.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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
Nazi's were Fascists, the epitome of right wing politics. Anyone who has studied any history would recognise that and the parallels in politics today.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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 $1000 worth of software. Enjoy:)
Oh! This is why.
Bass Strait, I'm guessing.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});