
Valve fined for poor customer service - eelliott
https://technicality.io/valve-fined-for-poor-customer-service/
======
brandur
Valve should admit fault and pay the fine. Although they finally have a refund
system in place on Steam these days, previously their system could be
considered borderline fraudulent.

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.

~~~
x0x0
Also, while it would obviously not catch every case, a warning that hey, this
game won't work on your current system seems like a pretty low bar. The valve
clients definitely can and I think do capture system hardware.

~~~
colejohnson66
To be fair, the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page
from the Steam website. Could they put the system info in a cookie?

~~~
CydeWeys
> the Steam Store in the client is just a browser loading a page from the
> Steam website.

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).

------
shakna
> General Counsel for Valve. Mr Quackenbush testified that Valve did not
> obtain legal advice when it started selling games in Australia and did not
> consider its obligations until the Australian Competition and Consumer
> Commission began investigating.

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.

~~~
colejohnson66
Why don't we have something like this in the US?

~~~
jazoom
You still can't transfer money between bank accounts, use a sensible system
for measuring anything or advertise correct costs (non-included sales tax,
tipping, etc.). I think you've got some more basic issues to tackle before
getting to something advanced like this. :P

~~~
pducks32
Fahrenheit is a very sensible system. 0: it's cold. 100: it's very hot. 50: so
so depends on what you perceive.

~~~
CydeWeys
Celcius is way more sensible. 0: Water freezes (cold). 10: Cool. 20: Moderate.
30: Nice and warm. 40: Hot. 100: Water boils.

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.

~~~
BoorishBears
In what way is the progression you described more sensible?

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)

~~~
CydeWeys
Temperature is important for a lot more than just weather. Fahrenheit starts
breaking down more once you start using it for other purposes. And why should
we have different scales for weather versus other common things like cooking?

~~~
BoorishBears
Are you really in America? Because I've actually never seen a cooking
appliance that didn't use Fahrenheit, I just forgot that's another place where
we use Fahrenheit.

>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.

~~~
CydeWeys
My oven, unfortunately, does use Fahrenheit, with no way to switch to Celcius.
Since I'm in an apartment, that won't change. My food scale, however, does
grams, and my electric kettle does Celcius.

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.

~~~
BoorishBears
As I said I'm not from the US originally, I've lived in countries with Celsius
for a lot longer than a year...

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.

------
unsquare
Valve where advertising laws don't apply to you.

[http://i.imgur.com/N3dEPjE.jpg](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...

~~~
tomnipotent
Valve doesn't get to decide how content creators set regional distribution
policies anymore than Netflix, Youtube, or Hulu does. This problem exists
across all similar platforms.

~~~
unsquare
I've actually contacted the Studio first and they threw the ball back at
Valve/Steam :)

Neither even acknowledge the region locking. ( to be fair, customer support
doesn't know any of that )

~~~
beedogs
And as usual, piracy wins.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Valve's Steam is a notorious… hmm, what would be the most charitable word…
cesspit, now? Over a third of its entire library was added in 2016. Since the
introduction of Greenlight, Valve has apparently ceased performing even the
most basic quality control. There have been games on Steam that lack an actual
game executable, and that's to say nothing of the games which actually do
“run”.

Maybe consumer protection suits will light enough of a flame under the right
part of their corporate anatomy for Valve to start caring again.

~~~
donatj
I get so irritated at the complaints that steam had the gall to allow you to
buy a bad game. I'd much rather have an open market of goods than a closed
censored market.

If you're risk adverse, wait for the reviews.

~~~
Gracana
I'm just annoyed that unfinished products are listed alongside everything else
on the front page. I don't browse anymore... If something interesting comes
out, I'll find out about it eventually, through other means.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It's not fair on developers, either. It undermines consumer confidence in any
game they see on the platform, and it unnecessarily clogs up the “new
realeases” list, giving you less chance at people seeing your game.

~~~
Mithaldu
> it unnecessarily clogs up the “new realeases” list, giving you less chance
> at people seeing your game.

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.

~~~
Dylan16807
Brigador is a game that is finished and not a hastily cobbled mess of stock
assets. It would easily pass basic quality control, and could get even more
attention without trash making it hard to find.

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.

~~~
Mithaldu
Without Greenlight being what it is, Brigador would never have gotten in. They
can't even get anything but the tiniest youtube/web reviewers to look at it
because it's not the "right aesthetic".

> 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.)

~~~
Dylan16807
> Without Greenlight being what it is, Brigador would never have gotten in.

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.

------
gavanwoolery
To Valve's credit, they generally have taken a pretty reasonable stance, both
in cases where they defended the customer and cases where they defended the
developer. I think Valve has taken a harsh stance on refunds because it is
something that can be rather easy to abuse. That said, Valve has a lot of
money to spare and I am sometimes surprised they don't cut their bottom line
to increase loyalty among developers AND consumers (i.e. maybe cover refunds
out of Valve's pocket rather than the developers, in cases where it makes
sense). This is not entirely different from how many brick and mortar stores
operate.

------
jazoom
>If you are unable to establish a legal compliance program alongside your
growth plan, then consider managing your risk through good customer service. A
high standard of service will likely meet most consumer laws and win you more
customers.

Good advice.

------
dirtbox
Valve have become a behemoth despite being one of the most lethargic and
inflexible companies around. They're by far the most profitable company to
employee ratio and you'd think they would be more capable of taking control of
these numerous situations and dealing with them, but they just leave all these
problems to fester until it damages both them and their customers. I just
don't get what their problem is.

~~~
SXX
Valve don't have investors or tons of shareholders to put pressure on them and
company operated in quite unique way. Downside is that no one at company have
time to deal with every problem even important ones.

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.

------
kogir
Set aside whether or not refund is deserved (I'm leaning toward yes?)

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.

~~~
jamez1
The converse is allowing US companies to break the law in other jurisdictions.
Imagine if Valve just kept the money and didn't deliver the games at all?
Surely you have to comply with the law everywhere you operate.

~~~
madeofpalk
Define 'operate' though.

~~~
shakna
In the cited case, operate means:

* Sell in local currency

* Accept local billing addresses

* Have hardware in local geography

------
rtpg
I imagine this will continue to be a hard problem.

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".

~~~
shakna
> So if I'm using Stripe, now Stripe is in the mess too if I get in local
> trouble. Or is it Visa?

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.

~~~
rtpg
Right, but let's say a foreign court passes judgement on you, and you
disappear. Stripe (or its partner bank in the region) is holding some of your
cash. I could see a seizure happening.

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

~~~
shakna
If you vanish, and have owing, then the civil forfeiture laws do come into
play.

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.

------
ajdlinux
The most important judgment in relation to this case is Australian Competition
and Consumer Commission v Valve Corporation (No 3) [2016] FCA 196, from March
this year. [http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-
bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FCA/...](http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-
bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FCA/2016/196.html)

------
AJRF
I have never ran afoul of Steam, but for some reason I always assumed that
they had great customer service. How I formed that opinion I am not sure, as
is evident I am appallingly wrong.

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.

------
problems
Valve's refund policy is pretty amazing, <2 hours played and <14 days and
you're good. Better than Google's even.

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.

~~~
shakna
> 41\. As to the Steam Refund Policies, the three relevant versions of those
> refund policies are as follows:

> (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.

~~~
problems
I'm not arguing that they didn't violate something legally, just that it seems
stupid.

What exactly did they violate? It seems against common logic if they're within
the bounds their own website offers here.

~~~
ux-app
> if they're within the bounds their own website offers here

In Australia "within the bounds of your own website" doesn't hold water.
Australian Consumer Law trumps a site's TOS.

~~~
problems
Sorry, that's not what I meant, I simply meant that their terms seem extremely
good to me, so what exactly is the conflict with australian consumer law? Does
it expect refunds to still be offered after a quite fair trial period on
products labelled as "early access"? That is what seems against common sense
to me.

~~~
shakna
The somewhat arbitrary played <2 hours doesn't matter at all. If it's less
than 7 days from purchase, and the product is not as advertised, then the
consumer is still entitled to a refund.

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.

~~~
problems
It still seems a bit ridiculous when it comes to games. Most games can be
beaten in less than 7 days and excuses made to get a refund under such laws,
especially with early access titles. What's a company to do in such
circumstances?

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.

~~~
shakna
A change of mind isn't a refund. It's false or misleading advertising that is.

~~~
problems
But Valve's current policy clearly seems sufficient to protect against this
just fine - the Australian consumer protection law takes it ridiculously far,
especially for a small development shop working on a product advertised as
"early access".

------
jschmitz28
At what point is a video game seller obligated to provide a refund to unhappy
customers? It seems like there's a large gray area between a feature
complete/bug free game and one that's completely unplayable.

~~~
madeofpalk
This is the blessing and the curse of Australian Consumer Law. It states:

> _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.

~~~
shakna
> reasonable to expect, given their price and description

Insurance market price tends to be the guiding star on what represents
reasonableness. That and precedents that have already been set.

------
stevebmark
This is ridiculous. What would be the legal implications of ignoring the fine?
What jurisdiction does Australia have here?

~~~
shakna
Valve has around 2 million registered Australian customers, from the
judgement, have rackspace and other servers in Australia.

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?

