Valve fined for poor customer service
technicality.io
technicality.io
In the past, I bought ~3 3-D games that claimed Mac support, but turned out to be completely non-functional on the platform because I had an Intel GPU. Upon pointing it out to Valve and the developers, they would deny fault, and reply that I should have read the system requirements more carefully. That may be true, but given that the majority of all Macs sold today come with Intel chipsets, there should have been a marquee warning in a 50 point font indicating that Mac is "kind of" supported, but not really.
So yes, there are corner cases. Eg if you've never installed the client this won't help with your first purchase. But so what?
No one told them they had to architect it that way. It'd be a reasonable requirement to have the purchasing experience from within the desktop client be aware of what the computer running the client can actually support. If that means doing something a little bit smarter than a simple embedded browser, then so be it. The Google Play Store knows which apps are and aren't compatible with all of my devices, and I don't consider that to be an especially high bar (but rather, the minimum).
That's the tech they already have on hand.
But a red box for graphics intensive games that says "We've never seen you on a device that can play this" is, again, a low bar. Or a windows only game for an account that is mac only.
And before you say that steam could detect that i don't use that computer anymore, they would have to ask for confirmation and that would be unexpected and annoying in my opinion.
Generally the necessary UX would be too complex to be useful.
At the beginning Steam tried to be "smart" and made it really hard to buy a non-Mac game on a Mac which was extremely annoying.
Or maybe someone could start an independent startup that provides this automated benchmarking service. I guess it's a legit excuse to learn how to write a gaming bot, as a weekend project.
I think it's certainly doable to some approximation of correct, and that Valve is probably in the best position of all the game distributors to do it with their existing HW survey infrastructure (and quantities of app on their platform) giving them a large background in what they're looking to quantify, and for whom. I just wanted to observe that it's far from trivial, and would still involve some level of crowdsourcing data (or paying someone like PassMark to use their single numbers for performance of given pieces of hardware as a scale for vendors to map things against, though the different workload numbers show that making this comparison isn't simple...)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/41rbhi/how_many_game...
Game developers on Steam != Valve
At some point you as a customer need to accept just a tiny bit of responsibility for your purchases, it's not up to companies to babysit you and check if you actually need the thing you're buying. Especially on a storefront like Steam, where you can buy a game on one platform to play it on another.
Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years.
When I worked at retail, IT support and at Apple Care almost every single PC game issue a customer brought to me was for, you guessed it, them buying it without looking at the requirements and their PC not meeting the requirements.
Look at it from someone without a technical background (the majority of PC owners): they don't know what their system has, they don't know what many of the terms mean or what's better than another and they don't understand drivers. At all.
The PC games that required the least amount of support? They were the runs that could run on practically anything and, granted, running on something sub-optimal is going to not be as awesome but hey at least it runs. There are many game frameworks that support this type of graceful degradation. I would like to see more companies adopt this attitude so anyone can buy any PC game and expect it to at least run.
Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"?
What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs and requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong.
This is confusing to the majority of consumers. I did support for ~3 ish years across multiple jobs for people who needed computer help. I can count the amount of people I talked to who understand what you just typed up on two hands over those years.
It's simply not consumer friendly. Us folks who browse HN? Yeah, we obviously understand. But the majority of folks actually buying the games? Nope.
> What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs
I'm not sure I follow. I went to school for game dev and, granted, I chose a different path but I know many game developers and they have multiple paths to degrading the experience onto some pretty terrible chipsets. Many dev studios do this while still pushing the limits on higher end machines. I always thought FarCry was great at this, I never had an issue running it on crappy Intel GPUs but it looked like crap at the same time.
> requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong
It's simply not intuitive. Yes if you own a PC and buy something for it you should know about it. But when you work in support for any amount of time you realize this is far, far from reality. You're not going to be able to educate everyone and surely, into today's world of download from an app store and tap, it's only going to be more common to expect everything to "just work".
I would argue that consumes shouldn't need to care about their specs if you want to provide any type of decent user experience. Tablets and modern hardware is actually getting pretty close to making this a reality. There are honestly not a lot of games out there that can't run on the terrible Intel GPUs.
(I don't disagree with your larger point that Steam should take a lot more responsibility to put up roadblocks to purchasing games that won't run on the system the Steam client is running on.)
It's also not a big deal as long as you refund the purchase. There's no reason not to refund it within the first 30 days / first few hours of play time if the consumer's PC can't run it. I'm not one of these people who believes that consumers are automatically entitled to refunds, and in fact I ran a service that offered no refunds due to the nature of the product, but refusing in the case of an incompatible PC, when you can see the consumer has hardly used the product and it's not past the return window, is just being asinine.
There's also no reason that Steam shouldn't be able to check your computer's specs before you install a game and see if they meet minimum requirements, and then give you a warning before you proceed if they don't. It'd be awesome if that warning automatically included a "Refund Me and Remove the Game from My Library" feature. It'd be even more awesome if Steam kept track of everything this happened on and offered you the same games at 20% off once it detected an upgrade. :)
Regardless, avoiding this confusion/complexity/consumer irritation is a large reason that consoles are more popular than PCs for everyone, from the developer to the retailer to the end user. Your standard consumer knows if they have a Xbox (or at least they did before there was the Xbox 1 and the Xbox One...), but they don't know if their GPU supports a certain API level or the difference between their low-end mobile nvidia GPU and a Titan X.
That's just not true for any kind of this years AAA titles. They may barely run on an Iris Pro, but everything else is not going to provide even remotely usable framerate (if it'll start at all). I think you're hugely underestimating the huge 3D performance difference between the laptop Intels and a gaming GPU card like the currently most popular GTX 970. Intel GPUs are connected to a significantly slower shared RAM over significantly less bandwidth, they're noticably more thermally restricted (since they're sharing cooling with the main core) and have significantly less processing cores.
Having said that, I do fully agree that having a clear UI to tell you if your game is playable on your current machine is in order. As far as I know, you can already refund the game without problems, there's just not clear warning. And I DO want a warning, not an error check - we've seen countless cases of misdetection when games refused to run on hardware they didn't recognise correctly. Not to mention the usecases like mine, where I regularly buy games on Steam on my Mac just to play them on Windows.
Lowering your resolution (play windowed) and going to minimal built-in configs is usually good enough for hardware up to 4-5 years old, which is reasonably competitive with the console lifecycle. Older than this and you usually need to get into hacking the resources/config to make it playable.
There may be exceptions, but this is absolutely the rule for AAA titles. Studios could never make their money back if they targeted only users with discrete GPUs.
Only 17% of Steam users have an Intel card. Not sure how you came to that conclusion :)
Let's see the most successful games of the year:
- Battlefield 1, needs at least GeForce GTX 660 / Radeon 7850 with 2GB of VRAM. Will not start on Intel. - Call of Duty: Inifinite Warfare. Same requirement. - Overwatch, actually runs on Intel HD 4400. Needs at least 660/7950 to run well
etc. :)
You're using Steam statistics as if they applied, proportionally, to the PC gaming industry when its users are majority PC gaming enthusiasts. This also means Steam makes up a small amount of most gaming company's sales. The majority is still done through big box stores. The statistics are interesting but I'm not sure how useful they are for determining target requirements from most gaming companies.
For the record, I played BF 1 at 3440x1440 on my GTX 670 (which I just replaced with a 1070 on Xmas Eve). It was plenty playable. No, I couldn't crank the settings to ultra, but most casual PC gamers don't expect to be able to.
The Intel GPUs are plenty powerful enough to run the games, but some OS X driver quirk makes them difficult for game developers to support. You can buy a brand new top-of-the-line Apple laptop (e.g. 13" of the new MBP line), and still not be able to play. Here's a thread of someone complaining about it for The Talos Principle for example [1].
When you have a brand new computer, it's not too unreasonable to make certain implicit assumptions about your ability to run a three year old game that ostensibly is supported by your OS. For the case of many games for Steam on Mac though, that instinct would be wrong. It's not the end of the world, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a customer to expect a refund if it happens [2].
Given that probably the vast majority of Macs sold today have only an integrated Intel GPU, Steam should really be going a step further here by either removing the Apple logo from them, or putting a caution sign through it. It's just too easy of a mistake for a customer to make, and there are so many potential buyers to make it. A tiny footnote in the system requirements isn't enough.
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/257510/discussions/0/62632918...
[2] And as mentioned above, Steam finally does offer refunds now, but they didn't for most of the platform's history.
They're really not. They may play most of the smaller games, but the AAA blockbusters will hugely struggle on anything but the Iris Pro. Especially if we take into account the additional ~30% OpenGL performance penalty on macOS vs. Windows.
You've refuted a claim that I didn't make.
I mentioned The Talos Principle specifically. The game is perfectly playable on an Intel GPU with smooth graphics throughout until you run into graphical glitches ~20 minutes in which have the effect of immediately killing any fun that you might have been having. They're not a performance problem.
Of course Intel GPUs aren't powerful enough to play modern AAA blockbusters [1]. The companies making these are well aware of this too, and don't release them for Mac, with a Windows/PS4/Xbox One spread being pretty much universally standard these days.
[1] With a few exceptions where huge effort has been invested to have games degrade gracefully for older/underpowered hardware. A Starcraft 2 for example.
That is just a bad idea.
The ACCC fiercely enforce Consumer Law, and are doubling down on efforts all across the country.
Consumer Law is an enormous benefit for citizens of Australia, and though the ACCC is still doing education campaigns on it, retailers dealing with Australia better damn well know their obligations.
All it takes is one Australian customer reporting it to the ACCC, and then they assign a lawyer to the case. It is easy for the consumer to protect their rights. So know them, and provide them.
I say this as an American, by the way. We need to stop defending our archaic system. It just makes us look dumb. Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us.
But we're digressing now and this comments section isn't about us not getting on board with SI.
[1] Note that I'm talking about the scale used during conversation, generally about ambient temperature (weather). The usual advantage of using the same scale for science and conversation isn't particularly relevant the way it is with, say, meters vs feet. Reckoning ambient temperature is not useful at all for the kinds of temperature-measurement you do in a lab.
Fahrenheit is used for weather, and in fact, even "metric countries" have been known to use it.
Sorry but this is just wishful thinking.
But I'd delete my comment, it's been downvoted ad nauseuem because people are insulted by the idea Fahrenheit might be convince to, this is the kind of hive mind behavior I'd expect on Reddit vs HN
Also, how old were these people you were interacting with? The UK switched to SI quite recently, well within the lifetimes of many living people.
Name few/any?
----
Even though I do remember the formula C=5/9*(F-32), Fahrenheit has never felt convenient or range non-arbitrary.
Zero being the freezing point in Celsius is a lot more important when it comes to weather conditions (provided the autumn/winters are cold enough where you live) - icy roads, clearing/scrapping windshields, skiing, etc. The boiling point is nothing to scoff at even when it comes to simple cooking.
To be honest, I think Fahrenheit is a more useful scale for typical weather temperatures.
For science, sure, °C is nice, but for common day to day use, which is the majority of temperature use, °C is senseless. I do not freeze at 0°C, I live in Minnesota and that is shorts weather. I do not boil at 100°C, I'd have been dead for a while. It's useless. Fahrenheit is much better at representing everyday life, the range in which I can be comfortable, below 0 or above 100 I'm better off staying in doors.
Also, don't forget that temperature is important for a lot more than just the air temperature. It's also used in cooking, where the boiling temperature of water matters a lot. Every morning I heat water to 98C to make coffee, or 85C to make green tea.
In Fahrenheit the entire "scale" is useful to describe weather. If I turned a knob that set the temperature of a room to 0% rotation, or 0 degrees, the room would be cold. If I set the knob to 100% rotation, or 100 degrees the room will be hot.
In Celcius the scale is arbitrarily cut off at 40. The resolution that you can represent a temperature at is severely limited if you don't have a decimal point.
I don't know anyone who went to school in the US and didn't learn SI units. Science in the US uses SI units. Fahrenheit is just a very convenient way to express weather on a 0% to 100% scale.
>Literally the entire rest of the world has moved on, and is just laughing at us.
Maybe young kids with nothing better to do on the internet. As an American born outside of the US who's traveled a lot, one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.
The parent post of all of this is provocative nonsense (I mean really, apparently this person doesn't know that we can do instant bank transfers, and fails to understand that sales tax isn't a constant across states and even county lines in some places)
>And why should we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?
Because it's not (currently) useful to measure weather on the planet we call "Earth" relative to the boiling point of water.
If/when the ambient temperature starts to move in a direction where it does scale from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water, we'll have much bigger issues than worrying about what units we're measuring weather in.
And I would contend that it's much worse to have two separate temperature scales, one for weather and one for everything else (including cooking), than to just use one for everything. People who grow up with Celcius have no problem whatsoever using it for weather. It makes total sense. Once you've used it exclusively for a month, it'll make total sense to you too. I promise. I frequently run into people who forget that water freezes at 32 and boils at 212. It's much harder to forget the numbers 0 and 100.
You're building the strawman argument that the only reason people use Fahrenheit is the cognitive load of switching then tearing it down.
Frankly it's a bit condescending.. (oh you don't really want to use Fahrenheit, you're just too lazy not to, don't worry it's easy to switch!)
And it's false, as evidenced by people in England and other countries I've visited who still refer to weather in Fahrenheit at times.
It really is the more expressive scale for weather, and even people who don't use it and despise Imperial units are usually up front in at least admitting it as such.
People don't usually need to remember when water boils or freezes when thinking about weather, or even cooking since cooking occurs at temperatures both well above and just below boiling. They know around 0 degrees it can snow and around 100 degrees they might get heat stroke if they're not careful.
I'm also somewhat amazed that no one has brought up Kelvin (my one true love) in this discussion yet. But that's my astronomy background talking. Black body radiation is a total mess unless you use an absolute temperature scale in the equation, for example.
I don't think anyone in India uses or even understands Fahrenheit.
100 is just as arbitrary.
> one thing people tend to agree on is Fahrenheit is very convenient for weather.
I've traveled a lot too, and not once have I heard that. But that is just as anedoctal as your claim. What is not anedoctal, is that weather reports outside of US almost exclusively use celcius.
Look up the original definition of the meter, kilometer, etc. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. In 1799, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889 and 1927). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. In 1983, the current definition was adopted."
How is something that is based on the then calculated distance from the equator to the north pole. Why do I say calculated? Well, because: "One of the earliest expeditions to set out with the explicit intention of reaching the North Pole was that of British naval officer William Edward Parry, who in 1827" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Pre-1900... No one had been there yet. So they didn't lay a tape measure down. You couldn't actually even do that. And the earth isn't even flat anywhere so you're measuring an idealized object. Even more arbitrary.
But ignore that... ITS BASED ON THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE EARTH... how is that NOT arbitrary? Well it is. That's why all of the new definitions of metric things are being redefined to be as close to absolute constants as they can be: "The metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 seconds."
But that's still really arbitrary because it comes from the circumference of the earth.
And your boiling point and freezing points are also arbitrary because it depends on the altitude you live at. Sure it's at sea level for these numbers... but who lives at sea level? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9162438 looks like 1/3rd to 1/2 (max). Maybe way less.
So the Fahrenheit argument is "the numbers that are generally useful to people for air temperature are those that exist in human inhabited or are generally hospitable", eg 0 (pretty cold) to (100) pretty hot with specialized areas knowing more about their end of the spectrum (minnesota, riyadh).
Your celsius argument means is that you care about temperatures over 100 (or 140) F up to 212F, or 37.7778 C up to 100C. I really doubt you care actually. You could just have a gague labelled "beef, pork, chicken, black tea, green tea, boiling" and be totally fine. Actually boiling doesn't even matter, it's pretty obivious when things are boiling and since it's a state change it's a very stable temperature.
It's valid that it would make things easier if the US was on the metric system. It would be valid to say that india shouldn't go 30 minutes off of the hour to have a solo time zone, because that makes time zones easier, same for indiana (if they still do that).
But don't pretend the metric measurements are any less arbitrary than the imperial ones. That's a very earth centric point of view. We should be on galactic measurements by now. You should see how much news.zcombinator.g out at alpha centauri is complaining about the metric system.
Some are less arbitrary, such as the Celcius.
But the most important aspect of SI units is that they form a system which is coherent _together_, and makes it easy to convert/calculate with.
The multiples of ten, divide by ten is a very nice feature. But if you think about it, base 10 is still arbitrary and human centric. It's based on the fact that we have 10 fingers. Not some universal constant.
That's a little less arbitrary than fractions of the circumference of the earth, or the coldest temperature in Danzig in winter 1708/9. (Weather ranges and human temperature preferences are also a lot more subjective)
Though, celsius does have the benefit of being on same scale as Kelvin, which is great.
And I don't even want to get into the differences between the different kinds of tons, pints, gallons, and miles. There are three different kinds of miles in common usage, plus over a dozen historical ones. It's enough to drive you mad.
We're not so good about SI units for temperature, speed, and distance though, despite the particular failings of the latter two.
an ounce is around 30g. A tablespoon has to be half of it and a teaspoon is ~5g
If I transfer from an account with the Commonwealth Bank, to an international account, like the English bank my brother uses, it takes 3-5 days, depending on if it's a weekend.
I haven't used an American bank before, but how does this compare?
... I can do it from my phone. Looks like America has some ways to go, yet.
The current NBN is crap, the rollout has been a disaster and the common person just doesn't understand how crap it actually is.
Thankfully a new line to Hawaii should open in January/February, and that might have a more significant impact on our current congestion.
It was supposed to cover 99%, but after the main street had to be torn up six times due to installation mistakes, the city said no more. They weren't challenged on the decision.
Because it is fttn, the main bottleneck, the last mile, remains precisely the same.
So I am required to pay 60, where I used to pay 40, for the same speed and data.
If you transfer between US banks, it will take between 1 and 5 business days, depending on when you send it (noon EST is a common cutoff time to have it done overnight), whether you've sent to the account before (sending with ACH, the "normal" way, requires you to confirm ownership of both accounts, which takes around 2 days) and whether you pay for it (if you pay $15-$20 for a "wire transfer", it can be done same day).
You can get around some of that (owning both accounts) by using a physical cheque (yes, they actually use those still in the US) but it can still take more than a day for the funds to be available, depending on the size of the transfer.
There are a whole ton of transfer services like Venmo that work around this by not using the banking system but in the end you usually need to get the money into/out of the bank somehow and you're stuck using the old ways.
Sending internationally is SWIFT, so mostly takes the same amount of time regardless of the bank you use or the country you're in (at least in my experience).
Another thing is that in order to get paid, I actually had to sign a permission to allow my employer to transfer money to my account with direct deposit. This means that there are means to transfer money without checks, but this option is somehow not readily available to anyone and the recipient has to sign a permission to allow it. Seriously, why do I have to sign a permission for someone to send me money?
I was absolutely baffled. In some ways, visiting the US felt like traveling back in time to 1980.
I don't think I've had a rental where automatic debiting of my bank account didn't occur.
I've also only ever used checks for bond, sent to the Bond Board. Never for a damn thing else. They aren't even accepted in most places. My employer pays directly into my bank account, no permission required.
Aside from that all you have is ACH, which is what's being complained about.
Most of the developed world has essentially free wire transfers.
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/ https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume... https://www.usa.gov/state-consumer
From personal experience, your state level agencies are far more responsive than federal. For example, if an insurance company ever starts playing coy with your claims, the mere threat of lodging a complaint with the state insurance commission is usually enough to cut through the crap. And actually lodging a complaint will quickly cut through the rest.
If in doubt, just hit up your state attorney general's office. If the right division doesn't fall under them, they'll still be able to direct you to the right place. And having been exposed to consumer complaints in two previous jobs, the vast majority of "official" complaints we received were from state AG offices. Making them my preferred first stop when I personally want to make a complaint and have it followed up on.
I might pay more for an XBox, but I know Microsoft will fix it.
I might pay more for a laptop, but I know the manufacturer will fix it.
More than that, I know I can just go back to where I bought it, and they'll take care of it for me.
I pay more now... So I won't have to in the future.
But anyhow, my original point wasn't about whether this is a good policy or not, just that it's annoying to hear the same people who cherish these "protections" then complain about being "ripped-off" when they have to pay for them. It's especially annoying when Australian politicians play dumb and try to paint the American companies as the bad guys.
I don't think the extra costs have a 1:1 relationship. Shipping and customs here can be tougher.
I haven't heard people who know the protections complain about costs. Surprisingly few people know their rights as a consumer.
My main point, which might be orthogonal to yours is: I shouldn't have to buy extra protection in the first place.
If I'm willing to pay $200 less for a TV and take a gamble on it not working after two months, why shouldn't I be allowed to?
We don't let restaurants gamble with food that might be off.
We don't let hospitals gamble with medecine that might work. There has to be trials.
We don't let cars that might be roadworthy drive around day to day.
What makes electrical devices, that might rip you off special?
Quality Control is mandated, because my day should never be ruined by a device that should make my day easier or more enjoyable.
My TV not working does not have any of those effects. There is a clear difference between a TV electrocuting and killing me (damages well beyond my initial investment) and it simply ceasing to function (maximum loss = initial investment).
More analogous examples would be: a restaurant serves me an overcooked steak that tastes like a shoe, my car's entertainment system stops working.
A TV of less quality can skip on standards, and that can mean safety.
A phone can be a firebomb. So can a washing machine.
Electronics should be held to a standard because they can fail dangerously.
Now, all that being said:
My phone cost $80.
My TV cost $100.
My washing machine cost $80.
My car cost $30,000.
I make around $45,000 a year.
Its been 5 years, and all of these products were covered by Consumer Law, and every company obeyed the rules if faults appeared.
Electronics don't have to be crap.
But that's totally irrelevant. We're talking about mandatory warranties for products, not civil liability for damages caused by them.
You're drawing a false equivalence between the two. My phone no longer working is a totally different situation, covered by different laws, than my phone blowing up and hurting someone or burning down my house.
One is less likely because of the other.
Higher base standards protect against products that are less likely to fail safe.
The insurance firm I worked with would lower premiums for products from companies that acknowledged Consumer Law, as they were both less likely to fail, and fail catastrophically.
That's because they let the consumer buy with confidence, without retailers and manufacturers needing to waste a stack of money on advertising to turn themselves into a 'well known name'.
Well that's how its supposed to work anyway...
-There are places keeping prices somewhat sane while having just as strong if not stronger consumer protection laws (UK/EU)
Companies selling dodgy products in Australia will get more returns and the costs will be higher, and those dodgy products will disappear, for both reasons.
Companies selling non-dodgy products in Australia reduce these costs, because they are free from defects so not returnable. It costs them nothing extra when they sell a product that works as advertised.
This has been a societal response to the economic cheat of planned obsolence.
It should be econonically cheaper if we make and buy stuff that lasts a little longer.
A more interesting question is: why is the free (unregulated) market not capable of establishing this economic optimum itself?
But like plastic cups and plates: washing metal ones is cheaper yet the invisible hand doesnt pick this option.
It may have something to do with product prices not representing actual costs. If you could pay your dishwashers the same as you could pay the chinese factory workers it would work itself out just fine.
Ps. The planned obselence was a post war strategy that we should have left behind by now.
http://i.imgur.com/N3dEPjE.jpg
The image above doesn't do justice to how bad the experience is as a customer, the tv show is already released in the US, but they make international customers wait to watch it. ( after buying it as if it was fully released ) and of course customer support tells you to post in the forums for help...
Neither even acknowledge the region locking. ( to be fair, customer support doesn't know any of that )
They can easily decide that they won't carry region-locked software (they didn't). They can easily decide to fix their broken storefront to not show misleading and false data (they also didn't).
Unless you're Netflix or HBO, few business have the resources to release a video product in multiple markets. It requires translation (subtitle or audio), marketing & advertising, financing, distribution, customer service, and many other invisible functions required to run a business. When you're a ~20 person studio, that's a little out of your budget.
This often requires working with a separate distributor in each market that can provide those services, including taking on the financial risk of distribution in exchange for profit share.
In most cases Steam is just a naive distribution platform and the last step in the "supply chain". It has VERY little impact on the overall success of the project, but helps simplify "last mile" distribution by getting the final product into the hands of customers - only instead of DVDs being shipped across the country in trucks to CostCo, we have Steam.
>> They can easily decide to fix their broken storefront to not show misleading and false data (they also didn't)
The responsibility is on the business managing a Steam account to ensure this data is accurate, not Valve. Same system is at work with the Apple, Microsoft, and Google app stores.
Maybe consumer protection suits will light enough of a flame under the right part of their corporate anatomy for Valve to start caring again.
If you're risk adverse, wait for the reviews.
Apparently it doesn't need to have any quality, be minimally functional, actually be your own work, be accurately advertised, or even be the game originally approved, though.
The last two should surely bother you. How can consumers make an informed decision when a game can have outright misleading advertising? How can consumers make an informed decision when the reviews are for a different game prior to a bait-and-switch?
There's a lot of crap on Amazon too, but reviews help to smooth things out. Not perfect, but definitely a strong signal
Are you serious? You have the entire internet at your fingertips and you can't make an informed decision about a game?
The amount of Let's Play and user reviews on Youtube should be enough information, but there's plenty of other opinions all over Steam forums and reviews to help you figure out whether you'll be asking for a refund or not. And that's the thing... you can simply get a refund if you don't like the game.
Seems like there's a few babies around here who want to be spoon-fed "high quality games only" or else they throw a tanty.
This complaint, while understandable, is not taking into account all of the reality in play here.
Steam was a curated trickle before, representing only a fraction of the flow of game creation, increasing chances at (but not guaranteeing) a certain level of quality, as well as a certain level of income for anyone making it in. It did however also leave out a lot of the total amount of creation. It was not a faithful representation of the entire market.
By opening the gates Steam now represents a bigger (though not total) part of the market, and now works more similarly to how the markets for books, audiobooks, music albums or movies work. Creators in these markets have been laboring under much more strenuous conditions, successfully, for many decades.
The "clogging" you decry is not useless, as it increases the breadth of content people can access (to give one example, Brigador would probably be dead now, given that it's ignored by media, despite being an excellent game, if it couldn't claw out a solid reputation on Steam month by month) and it's not unfair, as it's just how all other media creators had to live for a long time.
You could however blame Valve for not providing more solid search and filtering tools.
With a normal book or an album you at least have to put in the effort to make it yourself. Steam does not need the equivalent of a robot's print-on-demand wikipedia article compilation.
> With a normal book [...] you at least have to put in the effort to make it yourself.
Not so, Amazon has plenty of algorithmically generated books in its store, and even in bookstores, which are curated by default, you can find plenty of outright shit.
Also keep in mind i was responding to the complaint about the "what's new" list, which is something that was, is and remains useless in any store giving access to a huge market. (Steam's Discover Queue is really useful though and replaces it with an appropiately personalized What's New list.)
Valve could pay a couple people to check games to make sure they're not 10-developer-hours trash. It's not a choice between "allow everything" or "super-popular games only".
> Not so, Amazon has plenty of algorithmically generated books in its store
That's why I said normal book, and explicitly gave an example of how Amazon can be worse.
> even in bookstores, which are curated by default, you can find plenty of outright shit.
That's okay. I don't want steam to protect me from merely 'bad' games. I want it to reject games that don't even try, or aren't even half done.
To their credit Valve does show a pretty prominent "Early Access" message at the top so I dunno what the fuss is about.
The problem is: Valve's UX is so terrible that I accidentally came across that setting once, and I've never been able to find it again. But it does exist.
... and of course 3 seconds after posting I can't find it, I managed to find it. See if this URL works for you:
https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences/
Apparently you can also filter-out certain tags, so I can shove RPGMaker in that field and never have my time wasted by those ass pieces of JRPG shit ever again. Nice.
The trash flood has made Steam as nigh-unusable as any other app store. It used to not be the case.
- search by tags
- get recommendations based on your interests
- get recommendations about popular new games
- get recommendations based on what your friends like to play or want to play
- get recommendations based on what curators you choose reviewed
The "new stuff" list is useless, but the store is okay, and improving constantly.
- Tag searching isn't applicable to how I look for games because genre doesn't matter to me most of the time. I'm searching for something new (and because of this I have to use the "new stuff" list, which is a tire fire) and interesting and potentially worth talking about. That's not really expressed in tags.
- I have enough varied types of games in my library that the recommendations based on what Steam thinks my interests are is really, really bad. I don't like all or, probably, most of the games in my library; tons are bundle trash.
- Don't care about Valve telling me about popular new games. I'll find those through other sources if I care about them.
- Don't really care about what my friends are playing. They're my friends because occasionally we play multiplayer games, not because I follow their lead on the vast majority of games I play.
- Curators are, in my experience, functionally dead. Most are a joke, the few that aren't are rarely updated because they have no benefit to the people who could curate them--like, my interests tend to track Giant Bomb's, but they gave up on curation forever ago (not even sure it's run by GB staff, and barely has any new games that they've covered on it) because it was worth nothing to them. Maybe there are rando curators with taste, but kicking the problem down to "surfacing creators worth following" is not really any better, yeah?
And any automated recommendations fail a very important test: does this actually play? Because a whole lot of the trashflood currently all over Steam is barely functional. I'm not setting the bar high here--I can find something interesting in a game that's incomplete or even a game that's bad. But basic quality standards have fallen off a cliff in the House of Valve, and refunds don't give me back the time that nonworking stuff costs me.
Steam used to have a pretty decent guarantee: it might be a bad game, but it's gonna work. That's gone now.
Also, re:
> does this actually play
Never seen a recommended game not play. And i have a silly huge steam collection: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Mithaldu/
> - I have enough varied types of games in my library
So do i and it still works perfectly fine, you only need to exclude tags on trash type games.
Mind, one concession i need to make: I use EnhancedSteam and have a few thousand games marked as "not interested", which means they are filtered from almost all views. Maybe that would help you, since you sound similar to me.
To reiterate though: Usecases like yours and mine are not "the norm". On average people care for the features i mentioned and derive use from them.
If we were talking about the Android app store or whatever I'd agree with you as far as that I am totally a power user and I have power user needs. But for Steam specifically, I question what the norm is. I have yet to hear anyone--like, literally, anyone, not just "anyone in my power-user circles"--praise the Steam recommendations for what they are. My hunch is that Steam's userbase tends to be more engaged than a mobile app store's and that mobile app store experiences, and mobile app store quality bars, don't necessarily suit a Steam user. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants the Unity-game-skeleton-thrown-on-Steam titles. They are not a benefit. They can be excised.
(I've had multiple recommended games just totally fail-to-launch on both Windows and Mac, FWIW. Nothing underspec, just pfft, crash.)
I agree and grump a lot that Steam doesn't have a single global trigger to just hide all owned or not interested things.
> I have yet to hear anyone--like, literally, anyone, not just "anyone in my power-user circles"--praise the Steam recommendations for what they are.
Do you hear many people complaining about them? I suspect many people simply don't have an opinion and just use them as they are. I may be wrong though. What's your experience with that?
> Unity-game-skeleton-thrown-on-Steam titles
I mean, maybe it's me, the one falling into the "works for me" trap. I've literally never even had Steam try to show any of those to me.
> fail-to-launch
I'm fascinated, remember a few titles that did that?
I hear the people in my circles complaining that they can't find good stuff on Steam. They can find stuff when they're pointed at it, but...well, you can do that on any app store. Steam was better. It has regressed.
> I'm fascinated, remember a few titles that did that?
The outright launch-fails were a while ago, but one case of buying a pig in a poke that sticks out to me is Conquest of Elysium (one of them, I forget which). The game technically launched, but had no idea how to deal with a retina Mac and rendered to a backbuffer at full pixel resolution, which was then rendered to the display at double pixel resolution--unplayable, obviously. It's still in my Steam library because there were no refunds at that point. And refunds are nice, but they put the burden of proofing shit on the consumer when they should be on the platform and the vendor.
This seems to be working well for them.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103810-Good-Old-Ga...
Fuck Gog. I don't care about their listing quality.
Not that Steam is significantly better, but at least they never pulled a moronic stunt like that.
If you want to sell something that is in the development phase, I fully demand folks be upfront about it. If It isn't obvious from the description, you no longer have a honest, open market - you have something built to defraud me. Especially if you have a return and support policy tha seems complicated on purpose to deter refunds.
This really isn't about a "bad" game. I'm fine with a game that I simply don't like. I'm fully irritated when the controls make things nearly impossible. I'm irritated when the story doesn't make sense and seems like clips from other games (hello, Alone in the Dark for the Wii, you have all this). At least that last game is, technically, finishable, but the truth is it also hits the line between passable and not.
And some of the games? They don't even score that highly. This is what folks complain about. Not because steam let them buy a bad game, but because some of these aren't games. They aren't well-labeled enough, and so on and so forth. Then on top of that they have this horrible customer service that disallows refunds.
Steam allows refunds now. They have for quite some time. They also clearly label early access games. They have for some time. They also offer many different ways to unleash your dislike on a game for all to see, via their forums or reviews. You can even comment on reviews, or rate reviews. You can watch videos of games you're not sure about. You have the tools and information at hand to make an informed decision about the games you download on Steam.
Be honest, you don't really have anything to complain about do you?
Good advice.
According to some developers who visited office few years ago all Steam was literally developed and maintained by a "team" with less than 20 people or so. So Valve itself have very little number of employees, but very few of them working on anything Steam-related.
If I have a business in the US, and sell software online for USD, do I now need to prohibit international users from purchasing my software? I can't possibly comply with the laws in every jurisdiction. For now, the US alone is painful and complicated enough.
* Sell in local currency
* Accept local billing addresses
* Have hardware in local geography
Would this be allowed in any US jurisdiction?
The difference here is that Valve didn't do this. The operated in Australia (as other countries too) and sold under AUD. The pricing structure is vastly different between US and other countries (much more expensive in AUD for example, even when counting for conversion). So the argument that they aren't operating or selling goods in AUD falls completely flat for me.
They accepted AUD and AU billing addresses and Sold at market rates in AU. They actively opted in to the Australian Market at that stage and should be bound by consumer laws. Australian customers didn't go out of their way to make their purchases happen.
Ultimately I don't think as an online retailer you should be compelled to comply with all laws for where you customers are coming from, but if you actively join a market, you should.
They do, however, comply with Australian law with regards to ratings & releases, and they do have price discrimination - Items in the Australian Steam store are much higher priced than items in the US steam store, despite being sold in USD. Items are released to Australia at different times to the US, European, and Asian releases, and the selection of games in the store is (sometimes) different for Australia as compared to other countries.
In other words: Valve acts exactly like a company that has a discrete Australian store, but charges in USD to 'hide' that fact and attempt to evade their responsibilities under the Australian Fair Trade act.
> In this ordinary sense of carrying on a business, Valve undoubtedly carried on a business in Australia for six reasons.
> First, as I have explained, Valve had, and has, many customers in Australia with approximately 2.2 million Australian accounts. It earned significant revenue from Australian customers on an ongoing basis.
> Secondly, Steam content is “deposited” on Valve’s three servers in Australia when requested by a subscriber. It will stay on the server if it is requested again in a particular period of time.
> Thirdly, Valve has significant personal property and servers located in Australia which, at the time of acquisition, had a retail value of $1.2 million. Its Australian servers were initially configured by an employee who travelled to Australia (ts 122). They were updated in 2013 by another employee who visited Australia. Valve paid invoices including, in one case $436,389, to an Australian company (Equinix) into its Australian bank account for equipment involving servers (Court Book pp 676-677).
> Fourthly, Valve incurs tens of thousands of dollars per month of expenses in Australia for the rack space, and power to its servers. Those expenses are paid by Valve to the Australian bank account of an Australian company (Equinix).
> Fifthly, Valve relies on relationships with third party members of content delivery providers in Australia (such as Internode or ixaustralia) who provide proxy caching for Valve in Australia.
> Sixthly, Valve has entered into contracts with third party service providers, including companies such as Highwinds, who provide content around the world, including in Australia. Valve is aware that Highwinds has servers in Australia (ts 111) and that it is sometimes more efficient for customers in Australia to be provided content from servers in Australia (ts 112).
> For these reasons, even if Valve did not engage in conduct in Australia, the Australian Consumer Law was engaged because it was an incorporated body which was carrying on business in Australia.
But it seems like a business purely in the US would not have to deal with that but might have to deal with platforms that would have to comply with the laws.
In the case of software businesses you'll generally be OK if you ship quality software and offer decent customer service. You can even go with just one of these and have a successful business. The stuff that surprises you tends to be IP issues, not problems with otherwise happy customers.
It's extremely easy to set up a site and collect payments for a digital product. Almost by default, Australians might start purchasing goods.
So if I'm using Stripe, now Stripe is in the mess too if I get in local trouble. Or is it Visa?
Used to be that you would rrequire some physical presence in a country, but nowadays...
I imagine a lot of people are in contravention of a lot of a lot of minor reporting requirements in certain countries. There's probably a big market for "TurboTax but for everywhere".
No. You are.
Part of setting up these payment gateways is an acknowledgement that you have the right to sell your product in the jurisdiction.
I imagine financial institutions have insurance for this sort of thing though.
But let's replace Stripe with Shopify. Or some other service providers. I can see execution of court orders being tricky in practice
Visa and others do indeed have insurance policies in effect for such reasons, which is actually the area that gives me most of my experience in this area.
Seizure of goods does happen regularly, and if a provider refuses to play ball, then quite often their accounts are frozen, and processors who have a presence in Australia, like Mastercard and Visa, freeze the providers transactions as well.
Until such time as your funds are released to the relevant body, so they can arrange compensation and bankruptcy or receivership duties.
So Shopify used to not offer payment services for exactly this reason. (As far as I know.)
I appreciate it is hard to give anything other than boilerplate legalese to most customers when they throw the book at you, but this customer mentioned in the article even asked to have his case escalated. Fault lies solely with Valve as far as I can see.
I've refunded games for being made in 2016 and not DPI scaling on 4k properly. Wonder if this guy did something ridiculous and then tried to refund it, it seems like Valve's reasons are conveniently edited out in this very one-sided post.
> (1) the 2011-2013 refund policy (1 January 2011 to April 2013) (Court Book p 553);
> (2) the 2013-2014 refund policy (April 2013 to 23 July 2014) (Court Book p 555); and
> (3) the 2014-2015 refund policy (24 July 2014 to 18 March 2015) (Court Book p 349).
There were also four witnesses, who contested that Valve did not abide by the Consumer Law regulations.
Anecdata is hardly appropriate as counter-evidence when a judicial hearing has been made. Evidence from both parties was presented, and considered.
The finding was in the favour of those consumers who Valve denied refunds to.
What exactly did they violate? It seems against common logic if they're within the bounds their own website offers here.
They violated Consumer Law.
They aren't bound by the website, but by that which they provide.
They:
* Use AUD prices.
* Accept AU billing addresses.
* Have hardware in Australia
Thus, they sell and operate within Australia, and are bound by the rules that every company in Australia are bound by.
Thinking they can get away with things that the likes of Microsoft and Apple can't, seems rather shortsighted.
Technically, they don't use AUD prices. Everything is in USD, but the prices are regional, so they have specific prices for Australian customers, but charge them in USD.
It's an open question as to whether that is done to avoid currency risk, or to mask the fact that they are, in fact, doing business in Australia.
In Australia "within the bounds of your own website" doesn't hold water. Australian Consumer Law trumps a site's TOS.
An example of where this might have come into play in a reasonable circumstance: No Man's Sky, where Steam had to make an exception to their usual refund policy.
A product being labelled as Early Access doesn't mean crap. It's still being sold, and purchased. So the consumer still has their purchasing rights.
And Consumer Law will always trump anything Steam forces you to sign.
It's important to keep a good balance between consumer protection and productive economy. I think the law is in the wrong here, not Valve in this case. As someone else has pointed out though, this may have been prior to Steam's refund policy being added.
I really don't understand what seems to be an intentional disregard for Australians from Valve, in what should be a very clear allegiance in like-minded markets. Perhaps it's simply legalese gone wrong, but I really hope they don't burn bridges in their attempt to avoid the fine in court. I have been a very consistent Steam customer, and it is a truly second to none platform, so to see it go in this circumstance would be a real shame.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/account/returns-and-cancellat...
* Within 24 hours after first launching the game
* Within 7 days from date of purchase
* (If pre-ordered) Within 7 days of game release date
Valve gives to a little more calendar time, but Origin has no play time limit as far as I can tell.
That also doesn't seem to fit within Consumer Law... We'll see how long it takes for this one to come up.
> Goods must be of merchantable quality – they must meet a level of quality and performance that would be reasonable to expect, given their price and description.
> Goods must be fit for their intended purpose
While this gives consumers a fair bit of protection (for instance, this wording forces Apple (and others) to provide min 2 years warranty on iPhones), it can be difficult in some circumstances to establish what 'reasonable' means. Generally speaking though, common sense prevails.
Insurance market price tends to be the guiding star on what represents reasonableness. That and precedents that have already been set.
They are likely to appeal the ruling, but if they didn't, and ignored the fine, the courts have the right to seize property up to the value owed.
What part do you find ridiculous? A company operating in a nation not following said nation's obvious rules?