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Comment by afterburner | Hacker News Reader

This is just common in general. Nobody that you chargeback is going to want your business again. It's just that tech companies usually hold something you want (your account) effectively hostage, whereas a restaurant or whatever you can just stop going to. This does make it worse.

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We could regulate that: if you want to close the account (and thus withdraw all the bought items), refund all the money they paid for it.

That won't work for something like Steam. It would mean you got unlimited games for free.

That's why it's a great deterrent against punitive account closures. Right now, you pay 100% and get 0%. In that case, you'd get 100% of what you currently have on your PC, but pay 0%.

There's a compromise: they stop accepting any new business from you, but keep everything you've bought available: you pay 100%, you get 100%. It's what they should do, but they don't want to, because the current situation gives them a lot of power.

Hence a new regulation that tips the scales in the other direction to make Steam & co adopt a reasonable stance. The alternative would be to flat out force them to provide access indefinitely, but why not give them a chance to buy you out of your account if they really don't want to do business with you?

How so?

> This is just common in general. Nobody that you chargeback is going to want your business again.

Similarly, no company that I chargeback against do I want to do business with anymore. A chargeback is a "burn the bridges" moment. You have tried everything reasonable, and the company is now defrauding you. Why on earth do you want to continue doing business with them?

The problem is that your accounts with these businesses can accrue innate value over time. If you have spent 4 figures on buying video games on steam, and then want to dispute a fraudulent charge, access to all previously purchased items can be suddenly and permanently revoked. No to mention data like friends lists, game saves, etc.

Even worse, for XL companies who force one account across multiple products, the two things can be completely unrelated. If Google is refusing to RMA my pixel 7 phone which arrived defective, I can't issue a chargeback on that phone purchase because they'll remove my access to the last 10 years of family photos, my email, my domains, and my GCP servers.

Sure you could argue that this is the exact reason you should diversify these things across different companies, but in some cases the tight integration between these products is a compelling feature. The price for that feature shouldn't include removing consumer purchase protections.

This may be true for honest people, but I’ve been dealing with people recently abusing the chargeback system because they just don’t want to pay. (It’s mostly young users in Brazil)

Very frustrating as a seller.

In the case of companies like Steam the answer is: Because some products are not available elsewhere. So it's not that you want to do business with them but that not doing business with them also cuts you off from a large number of other companies. Similarily, if your water company overcharges you then you still want to be able to get water even if you need to charge back or take them to court over the dispute. In some way, Steam has taken over the role of infrastructure for Game delivery and I don't think its unreasonable to recognize that by applying different rules to them in the same way your local power and water companies get different rules from a mom&pop store.

That’s fine for a hotel, but it’s not fine for services where you also loose access to your inventory.

It's common, but not universal. I once charged back gift cards that had been purchased through my hacked Zune store account (which tied into my main Microsoft account). I had some email back and forth with support and informed them that that's what I had done and why and they unlocked my account. That said, I wouldn't rely on that today.

No restaurant is going to remember my face forever over a simple payment dispute.

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