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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

It's also worth noting that if you do a chargeback, a company like Uber will often block your account and phone from using their services. Doing a chargeback against Steam for instance and they will ban you, preventing you from playing games you've paid for ("leased" more accurately). So, it's important to be careful about doing chargebacks unless you're sure the company you're doing a chargeback against is one you never wish to do business with again.

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It seems like this behavior should also be reported to the credit card companies. In the case of Steam, it seems like what you should do is have the credit card company charge back ALL the purchases you made if they ban your account.

This is exactly why when a new game comes out, I check to see if it is available on GOG.com before checking Steam. Thanks to GOG's DRM-Free policy, you can download and store the game installer. Not all digital distribution is bad.

Try http://itch.io , too (Disclaimer: my company has uploaded games here). It's incredibly developer friendly and they host game jams constantly http://itch.io/jams

GOG's fake-refund policy of "work with support to prove the game opens" is illegal in Australia and probably most countries with consumer protection laws. They're no better at respecting their customers than Valve, they just misrepresent it better.

These days you can finish most modern AAA games in the time countries with decent costumer laws let you refund a product. Not to say that with GoG DRM-free policy, you could buy the game, download it, and ask for a refund in no-time.

I find GoGs policy a nice middle ground to Steam, on one side, and ruining their business as you suggest, on the other.

The assumption that anyone seeking a refund is trying to screw the company is how criminal policies at companies like Steam and GOG evolve. It's actually easy to identify the bad people while maintaining a legal and ethical policy for customers - two distinct groups.

FWIW, while it's not as convenient as at Gog, you can still play all your steam games where the publisher/Dev didn't add the drm. Most should then work by copying the installed files

> It seems like this behavior should also be reported to the credit card companies

Hit them where it hurts: state regulators. If you're in New York, for example, complain to the Department of Financial Services (DFS) [1]. They're hard hitting and know what they're doing. (I think California's analog is the California Department of Business Oversight (DBO), though it isn't, to my recollection, as intimidating as DFS.)

[1] http://www.dfs.ny.gov

There's also the CPFB for those in the US https://www.consumerfinance.gov/

That's great, thanks. I don't live in New York though, and I'd bet most people reading this don't. I wonder what the equivalent local regulators are.

Someone should make a list of all local regulatory agencies by location. List all places hat deal with average joes as well as how likely they are to respond to you and how often they win against companies.

Steam has a litany of disclaimers to block refunds. Even games dropped by developers don't matter to Steam. I had a few hours registered to a game I could never get to work beyond a few turns but since I "played" it I was not entitled to a refund.

I really dislike digital distribution of games and software on this point. While some Steam games I can run offline I am not sure if all of them can be. Plus how do I reinstall?

It is a sad state of affairs when being a buyer on ebay is safer than buying from Steam

It always surprises me that I've never seen anyone take real legal action against a platform like Steam over this sort of policy. You can put almost anything you want in your terms of service, but in most places if it's blatantly one-sided and unreasonable there's a chance that courts will strike it down, particularly in areas with relatively strong consumer protection laws like Europe. Something like blocking access to previous purchases because of an unrelated dispute seems about as one-sided and unreasonable as you could get; it's essentially no better than the kind of anticompetitive practices that are explicitly illegal in various other contexts.

I was also under the impression that the card networks frowned upon trying to prevent cardholders from exercising any chargeback right they have with their card. Then again, I have business interests that accept payments via these card networks and I've never even seen the full terms that we supposedly agreed to on the merchant side, so I don't know how I'd check even though we're presumably subject to the same rules, whatever they are.

There's no incentive for a private party to sue them because the losses are so small that even a class action isn't worth pursuing. Any legal action would have to be government-initiated. That's unlikely in the US due to the current political climate, and EU action would do nothing for us across the pond, and vice versa.

In the US that might be true, but a small claims action if they locked someone out of a large number of previously purchased games wouldn't be out of the question somewhere like the UK.

> I had a few hours registered to a game I could never get to work beyond a few turns but since I "played" it I was not entitled to a refund.

Cough, ahem, No Man's Sky...

According to Steam I'd played around 40 hours, but in reality most likely <10 hours active and stupidly left the game idling a couple of nights which racked up the hours.

I tried to get a refund from Steam and was refused, I then tried a charge back from PayPal and Steam stepped in and more or less told me that if I continue down this road I'll be locked out of all my games.

A few lessons learned:

1. Don't pre-purchase games

2. Wait a couple of weeks for real gamer reviews

3. Avoid Steam/digital distributions for higher value games.

This has certainly soured me from buying anything costing more than a few quid on Steam.

>> 1. Don't pre-purchase games

>> 2. Wait a couple of weeks for real gamer reviews

I know it's hard to do if everyone you know's playing the latest hotness, but if you can wait a few months, you can usually get the game heavily discounted in one of Steam's (or Humble, Green Man or other Steam key sellers) quarterly sales.

I used to buy my games on release date at or near full price, but these days I try very hard to wait as long as I can for them to get heavily discounted. When you pay much less than full price, the sting is lessened if you chalk up too many hours to get a refund.

> but if you can wait a few months & > playing the latest hotness

To be honest NMS is the only game I've paid for prior to the release date, and even then I only paid for it a week beforehand.

I'm not a huge gamer (with the exception of dipping into Eve Online no and then). But NMS was hugely attractive to me, less so from the gamer/press hype, but from all the things Sean had talked about and demo'd.

That'll learn me.

Yeah, this is the same with me. The last game I bought at full price was watch_dogs, and I felt ripped off that most of the season pass content was the same copy and paste missions as the rest of the game, with only one proper DLC.

Last month I bought Dishonored 2 for £10 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for £8, roughly six months after release (when they were £60).

According to Steam I'd played around 40 hours, but in reality most likely <10 hours active and stupidly left the game idling a couple of nights which racked up the hours.

THIS. I posted my own comment, but I also suffered from the same crash/hang refund issue. The game was so unplayable I gave up, and shut down my Steam link. Unbeknownst to me, it was still running and therefore Steam refused my refund, and didn't reply to my follow up.

My Steam refund story: Bought a shitty game, asked for a refund but because said shitty game crashed and "ran" overnight, they denied my refund because I "played" for 25 hours straight. It was $5 so I let it go, but I received no response to my follow up regarding the reason why there was time logged. Bad support.

You can run Steam games in "Offline mode" if the network goes down and you were most recently logged into that computer, for up to (iirc?) 30 days.

And reinstalling the games is easy. You can install a copy on any computer you log into. You just can't play more than one at a time.

If you played a game for more than a couple hours, are you really entitled to a refund? And when you mention "Even games dropped by developers don't matter to Steam" do you mean early access games?

Caveat emptor. Digital distribution won't magically prevent you from buying bad games. Look at reviews, try the game for an hour or two, and ask for a refund if you don't like it.

I plaid a game a while back that was stuck in the tutorial level. The game company said that it was a known bug and that they would provide a fix for it. The fix never came. Steam tried to claim this same thing with me. Yes I was entitled to a refund despite having tried to change settings and despite being in the main menu of the game.

Steam has an automated refund policy nowadays. You just need to ask a refund for your new purchase and you will get the refund the next day.

Tried it twice, works wonders.

I don't think that's a good idea, but anyway there are time limits. You can chargeback something more than a few months old.

i assume you meant to say "you can't chargeback..." since you're pointing out there are time limits.

in my experience the time limits are related to delivery of the service. for instance, you pay with credit card for a service happening 9 months in the future. if the appointed day arrives, and the service is not performed, there won't be a problem getting a charge back even though the actual charge was 9 months old.

And in the case of steam, the "time of service" is at all points in the future?

i'd certainly make that argument to my credit card company if steam cut me off completely.

i don't think it's crazy for a software company to want to claim that i'm leasing software from them after a one-time payment, but if that's the case, i also feel like i forever have grounds for the return of my money if they ever break the lease.

With Amex, at least, you can only do chargebacks for purchases in the last six months. Probably similar for others. Just something to be aware of. Even if you have indisputable proof of theft or fraud or whatever.

I'm not surprised, Chargebacks are inordinately expensive for the company. The initial cost is usually over $25 regardless of the size of the charge. [1] I can go up from there. If they fight it, which they will likely loose because CC companies stick behind card holders, it will cost more.

To ensure they don't get more chargebacks, they have little choice but to block your account. Most companies will do whatever they can to avoid a chargeback. It's better to start there if you want to maintain a relationship.

[1] https://chargeback.com/chargeback-fees-processor-library/

I know. I experience quite a few with PortableApps.com with open source donations. Unfortunately, if you use something like PayPal, you have to monitor every donation and reverse any suspicious ones and eat the cost regularly. You even have to maintain your own internal list of what email addresses have committed fraud before because PayPal doesn't ban them.

Having been involved with chargebacks from both the consumer and company perspective, for the company, it can be really frustrating when customers chargeback without ever trying to contact you.

Often, the company is happy to rectify the situation if you contact them, because like you said, chargebacks can be expensive per transaction.

In my experience, sometimes consumers will run a chargeback even for legitimate purchases. For example, a spouse will run through a credit card statement and do a chargeback if they don't recognize a purchase, without even checking with their partner. Then, the credit card company often sides with the consumer despite evidence, and if you sold a tangible good, you're SOL.

It's a real problem with Steam or any other place where your account is tied to stuff you want to keep. But with Uber, what would prevent you from just making a new account and carrying on?

Because Uber will go very far to track you and your multiple accounts: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

they can easily tie an account to a phone number.

Get a new number from Google Voice or similar?

I have heard similar stories about Sony's PlayStation store too. If you charge back, they ban your account. Now you cannot play online anymore. Even offline games may not work since the license is tied to your account.

Steam recently got fined for their deliberate, long-running, fraudulent, criminal behavior -

http://www.pcmag.com/news/350574/valve-fined-3m-in-australia...

They're estimated to have stolen from Australians 22,000 times out of ~25m population so you can imagine why they scrambled so hard to change their policies before justice was served in the EU or US.

I've never issued a charge back so I'm in unknown waters, but if I wanted to keep my account with Steam after a charge back, couldn't I just update my account to use a different credit card?

No, because they ban the account, not the credit card.

You can make a new account and use a new credit card I guess, but you still lost your library of games.

But do you pay an upfront amount to get games on steam? It's not a subscription then, how do they justify preventing you from using them?

> how do they justify preventing you from using them?

they don't need to justify anything. Their platforms, their rules. You signed your rights away when you clicked yes to the EULER.

Of course, you can litegate, but then you'd end up costing more money than you can gain, and probably no one will find it worth the hassle.

They may have an arbitration clause, in which you agree to not litigate. 4D chess.

That would not hold up in court. At least not in European court. Consumer law trumps EULAS and its illegal to put arbitration terms in consumer contracts.

Take a look at what's happening with AT&T, arbitration in the USA. Consumers have lost a lot of their "rights"

EU is generally a lot more consumer-friendly than US. Or company-unfriendly depending on your perspective.

Yeah, you purchase the game before playing it generally. The justification is that you've only purchased a license to play it, which they'll revoke. Still some BS to get locked out if you pay upfront for a game. It's also way worse when you realize how garbage their customer service is. It's pretty hard to get a human on the other side within a week or two, so it's way harder to get wrong things fixed.

Why would anyone use steam then?

Because it's tremendously convenient, the games are cheap, and there's a two-week, two-hours-played window for refunds.

"But I can't chargeback if I get irrationally gamer-ragey" is not something I've ever worried about, ever.

Credit card charge backs are a federal law created to protect consumer rights.

Steam's ToS are at odds with federal law in this respect as they say I have a 2 week / 1 hour window to get a refund.

Federal law says I have 60 days and then outlines under what conditions, but they are pretty broad.

Previously I purchased a software license for Gamemaker Studio Master Collection (directly from YoYo, not through Steam thankfully).

This was when Windows 10 was very new, but YoYo claimed it was supported. Turned out it had bugs with some configurations and so it was crashing on launch; completely unusable.

I opened a support ticket and was following up, but they had no idea how long it would take to fix it.

Next thing that happens is they drop the price from about $800 to about $400.

There I was, still unable to use the software and now it was 1/2 the price. So I contacted them again and said, "Look, it's been a month now and you still haven't fixed this and you dropped the price to 1/2 what I paid. I've been really patient, the least you can do is refund me the difference since I still can't even use the software."

They came back and said, "No it was $800 when you bought it you just have to wait until we get it fixed."

At that point I was super frustrated and replied back and said, "I'm done, just refund the entire amount and cancel my license."

YoYo's reply was that they don't give refunds under any circumstances and that it was plainly spelled out in the EULA.

So I called my credit card company and they did a charge back.

Circling back, now they sell through Steam and if this had happened Steam would ban my account and block me from ALL software I had ever purchased from them.

It's unethical and bordering on illegal that Steam takes retaliatory measures against consumers for excercising their consumer credit rights as provided by federal law.

Quite frankly Steam should be on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.

Not charged back. But steam having a kill switch where they can prevent you from playing any game if for any reason they don't like you. I'm not sure I would pay any money upfront for what is really a subscription.

I don't think it's something that you need to worry about unless you're gonna be overtly shitty. I have my beefs with Valve, but not on this topic. Even if you get caught hacking in a multiplayer game, your account isn't banned (though you may be VAC banned from playing multiplayer in games that participate in VAC). Steam-wide bans only come from chargebacks that are against your EULA--and their refund policy is pretty reasonable, I think--and similar stuff pulled against Steam itself rather than anything you'll do during the course of using the service normally.

And if you're really paranoid about it, you can pretty easily back up games and play them with a cracked Steam DLL. It's not a big deal.

Some games give you no choice.

Well your card is linked to your account. So you can start a new one, but you won't have access to any of your old games

i wonder if it's worth making a new account for every purchase, and then writing a script/custom client to map each game to its account, and create an automatic login shortcut for each game. This way, if you find any issues and had to chargeback, you only lose one particular game.

They do some tracking of clients and I imagine if you start refunding more than they would like they would piece two and two together.

The account itself has a restricted set of functionality. Although a little sleuthing on Google seems to indicate there is a time horizon on this. Possibly while they investigate?

Difference between this and Steam appears to be Uber losing control of the account. That's how the purportedly fraudulent charges were made. With the Steam stories I've heard, the card was usually lost and then used on Steam or otherwise the account password was lost by the user.

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