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Comment by eslaught | Hacker News Reader

Or they delete your account.

I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The majority of users may never experience this, but the fact is that when you use a service like this you're at the mercy of the service provider, even for basic things like maintaining access to your account.

What I'd like to see is some sort of movement towards "if it looks like a purchase, then it is a purchase". That is, if I pay a one-time up-front free for access to something (even with DRM), we should pass legislation to make it behave like a purchase and limit the shenanigans that providers can pull. (Granted this is a very ill-formed idea and there are lots of details to work out in order to implement it.)

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You are also limited in recourse if Valve screws you over. If a retailer seriously screws me over and I'm not able to resolve the issue with them I can always resort to doing a chargeback. If I try to do a chargeback on Valve they will immediately close my account and I'll lose access to thousands of dollars worth of games that I "bought."

Is there a limitation on how far back in time you can chargeback? I feel like if I was wronged by Valve and needed to chargeback to make things right, if they closed my accuont, I'd chargeback every purchase (or as many possible) that I made through them.

For fraud, not usually, but you would have to prove fraud.

For any other reasons most banks/credit card companies put limits between 30 days and a year I believe.

> I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account".

The worst part about this is that it often happens when consumers exercise their legitimate rights to e.g. chargebacks. And yes, Steam does it too: if you chargeback a Steam purchase, even a fraudulent one where the CC company sides with you after the investigation, usually this will result in your account getting locked and held hostage until you undo the chargeback and eat the cost.

That's when it's time to sue.

The Steam user agreement includes a binding arbitration clause preventing you from suing: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11. There is no escape.

Actually there is: be a EU resident. It's even explicitely stated there.

Have these actually been tested in court? I believe if someone actually decided to sue it would go about as poorly as non-compete clauses in employment contracts.

Yes, SCOTUS has repeatedly upheld binding arbitration clauses as valid, and that they even override state law and apply in cases of naked fraud by the company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc... (binding arbitration overrides state law)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/business/supreme-court-up... (binding arbitration overrides workers' rights)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/supreme-court-backs-... (binding aribtration applies even in cases of fraud and deceptive advertising)

In a sense this is just codifying what has always been tacitly true - the court system isn't really intended to protect the common man against the economic, political and social elites, it's primary purpose is as a dispute resolution mechanism among those elites.

They teach arbitration and related matters in many law school curriculums now, another sad sign of the continued slide into privatised legal systems.

Unfortunately they have been successfully tested often in many legal systems.

If you’re testing an arbitration clause outside of arbitration then it’s already clear that the arbitration clause wasn’t binding.

When do I have a right to issue a chargeback against Valve? I enter a purchase contract that says that I pay them and they provide me access to a game (or some other item). If I believe they didn't uphold their part and I can't resolve it with customer service I can sue them. Nothing gives me the right to just break my part of the contract and take my money back.

> If I believe they didn't uphold their part and I can't resolve it with customer service I can sue them.

Actually no you can't (at least if you're in the US), because the Steam user agreement mandates binding arbitration: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11, where, for all practical purposes, the consumer always loses.

> Nothing gives me the right to just break my part of the contract and take my money back.

The whole point of chargebacks is that they're supposed to give you that right, if the CC company decides that the vendor wronged you. Valve's behavior here is an unethical and unilateral end-run around this process.

How is it an "end-run"? Your CC chargeback agreement isn't sacrosanct or a law. It's just another private contract, on par with your contract with Steam.

The real problem is that a Steam "purchase" are fundamentally an undefined-term rental. When you "buy" a gsame, you are buying nothing, and then Steam might let you access a game if they wants you to.

Welcome to the brave new world of Libertarian Utopia, where all your have is an endless rage over contracts and stipulations... /s

Libertarian Utopia dating[1] has too much paperwork, and the nightclub attorney's fees are gradually changing my cocktails into cheap watered down beer. Giving up on interacting with real humans and ordering a Cherry 2000[2] would be a lot easier - and a lot cheaper!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urS8GmwmeWQ

[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qwvz5/how-cherry...

Will check that out, looks funny enough to dedicate some time to it

Your agreement with the CC provider isn't binging for Valve, but Valve's aggreement with the CC provider is (which they need to even accept cards in the first place).

Admittedly, I don't know that much about the contracts between CC providers and merchants, but in the big picture of things, CC providers are the giants and Valve is the little guy, so I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't have a lot of leverage in those negotiations. Otherwise, presumably the CC provider would be unable to initiate the chargeback in the first place. The fact that the chargeback itself is successful (Valve's retaliation notwithstanding) is evidence that the contract between CC provider and Valve allows chargebacks.

In this particular case, what this probably means is that CC providers need to include a "no retaliation" clause in their contracts for customers who issue legitimate chargebacks. That's assuming CC providers care, and maybe they don't, but point is they have the power to fix this and if it becomes a problem for their customers presumably they will.

But I don't think any of this solves the broader issue though. In general I don't think you can depend on having a powerful authority like a CC provider side with you like this.

I dont know how easy is it to transfer games to another account - but if possible you could do that then initiate the chargeback

You can't transfer games between accounts on Steam

The customer is exercising their legitimate right to chargeback, and Valve is exercising their legitimate right to not do business with the customer after that.

The problem is not that Valve is exercising the right not to do business with them, but that they're taking away everything they ever bought from them. It's akin to me wronging Amazon and they come to my house and pick up everything they ever shipped me, and take it all back.

I question how many of those horror stories are legitimate. Many users who have made these claims have later been revealed to have been violating the platforms rules in an egregious manner (i.e. cheating).

I don't think I care; cheating in a game doesn't seem like sufficient cause to lose it to me. Ban from multiplayer, sure, but lose access to the game or even your whole library? Seems excessive.

The people who cheat in one online game tend to do it in every one they play.

> Ban from multiplayer, sure

That kind of what they are doing. You can still play pretty much anything that doesn't run on VAC-secured servers. There are consequences on the steam community as well, though. The most significant are probably your profile being branded and restrictions on item trade/using the market.

Back in the day, you could enter special codes to cheat, or execute certain button combinations on the controller. There were even various devices that allowed you to cheat. Imagine if doing any of those things made your entire cartridge collection disappear..

Very different scenarios. If you disliked the person cheating on a console you could smack them upside the head and stop being friends with them. The ramifications for cheating in games designed specifically for multiplayer with many strangers are entirely different.

It's kind of like saying "imagine being arrested for being naked in public omg I do that all the time ... at home". It's different degrees of freedom.

The solution is to just register a new account for every purchase. Better privacy, better protection againsts account freezes/hacks and better resellability. Using social features is a bit of pain, but for me that's not really a feature in the first place. I don't like Steam to become a social platform.

This is the risk with any online service and you evaluate the customer service of the company as part of the evaluation process of doing business with them. Valve enjoys a pretty good reputation and so most people accept the trade-off.

Steam desperately needs competition. It would be interesting to see how much more the market would pay to actually buy games again rather than rent them.

I agree, but their network effect (among consumers and among game producers, who rely on Steam's wide distribution channels, anticheat/antipiracy tech, and analytics) is so huge that a competitor would have a very hard time.

For the AAA games that are actually available there, you can compare sales figures between GoG and Steam. It's not great for GoG I imagine, although I do appreciate that service vastly more than I do Steam.

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