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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

> Valve lets me download games and films for gigs as much as I like

only if you have a valid account with them. Which is the exact issue the original article was complaining about. Now, a Steam account stays valid even after the credit card has expired, but if you lose that account for whatever other reason, all your content is gone.

Which is worse than many ebook readers because they will allow you to continue to access your content even once the account is gone. Steam OTOH doesn't. No account? No login. No login? No content (their offline mode is too unreliable to be called that).

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How exactly do you lose an online account?

PayPal backs out of a transaction and locks your account after you try and pay steam with it. Steam say, hey, you didn't pay us, we're locking your account and you lose all your games that you've bought so far. True story, happened to my brother. Took hours on the phone to sort out. Still never using paypal for anything like that again.

Can you explain in more detail? How could you owe steam money if you didn't finish the transaction? Did paypal somehow promise steam the money long enough to complete the transaction and then pull takesie-backsies?

That is typically exactly what is claimed by the victims, that paypal first completes, and then is later rescinded/charged back for whatever reason; steam then removes access to the account. I've heard a wide enough variety of paypal horror stories in general that I presume it's not all a case of user error.

This isn't a reply directly to you, Winthrowe. But more to this line of thread.

The wrongs of Paypal have been mentioned, but most account blocking happens when a user violates Steam's TOS. Being an abusive jerk online while logged in and playing games. Or cheating.

Now, I think that's bullshit. You still paid for those games. I think you should own them. Completely. At most they should block you from their servers and their online play.

But with Steam you can easily download any title you own as many times as you like. Steam has its own problems, but this they got right. You can even back them up quite easily. (Man, that used to be a broken tool, but even it's good now.)

There's a difference between a VAC ban and a TOS ban. VAC ban means you can no longer play (mostly Valve) games online.

A TOS ban means your account is no longer usable.

Steam was removing access to his account basically because it felt like he didn't pay for some games in it. Which is reasonableish (the ones he had from before really shouldn't be affected. It'd be better if it just removed the games he bought with paypal). It's like if someone has their check bounce on you, they don't get to keep whatever they paid for.

Since the money was a gift to my brother, it wasn't tied to a bank account, which made paypal suspicious.

You don't have any real control over that account. I can think of ways to lose an account and while not all of them are very likely, I wouldn't be surprised to see all of them happen in, say, the next five years or so if they haven't already happened:

The database could get corrupt or the data center burnt down and if the service provider hasn't a good backup strategy your account could be gone. The same goes for unauthorized access to the database or your account, it can be removed without your say so. Or the service provider is shut down by the government for whatever reason. Or worse, your country decides that the service provider may not operate in your country and that all accounts of people from your country should be removed and they comply. Or some governmental agency takes all the servers of your service provider and won't give them back (in one piece).

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