Re: Games Discussion Thread
Indeed, I'm just saying this is far from an open shut case. As someone with legal experience, if I was being Valve's lawyers, it's definitely a point I'd seize upon. If they want to fight it, that is. I mean, I'm fairly confident Valve *could* win, if they really wanted to, but it'd involve using a lot of the scummy tricks people hate lawyers for. Valve may be "in the big times" now, so to speak, but I'm not so sure they'd actually pull out all the stops like that.
ALL CHARGES INCURRED ON STEAM, AND ALL PURCHASES MADE WITH THE STEAM WALLET, ARE PAYABLE IN ADVANCE AND ARE NOT REFUNDABLE IN WHOLE OR IN PART
The above is the Steam Subscriber Agreement's position on refunds - which is to say, Steam's official statement of it's policy, which all it's customers are presented with and which they must accept to use Steam. There's a bit below the part I quoted about EU users being able to get refunds, because the EU did something similar to what Australia is currently doing; unfortunately for Steam, Australia isn't an EU region.
The primary issue for the case isn't whether or not refunds have been provided; it is whether or not Steam's policy is illegally misleading. Given that Australian Consumer Law has a clause that explicitly makes it illegal to present a blanket, 'no refunds' policy to an Australian consumer, and that the above Steam Subscriber Agreement has to be accepted by all those who use Steam, Australians included, there really isn't much question around whether or not Steam is doing the right thing.
I'm sure with sufficient lawyering, anyone could win any position, of course - they could probably play the "'service' rather than 'product'" card and it might get them somewhere - but as OAMP points out, they would need to use the vilest of the vile legal loopholes to pull it off, because the facts simply aren't on their side.
I shudder to think what retail laws America must have, if the initial conclusion Squid jumps to is that 'any consumer will be allowed to receive a refund for a product on the basis of 'I didn't like it''. Australia's Consumer Protection Laws aren't some pithy, 'return-in-thirty-days-and-you'll-get-your-money-back' policy. They explicitly exclude any legal right to a refund/repair/replacement in situations where the person simply didn't like what the product did, didn't read the information that was presented to them, knew about the fault beforehand, etc. If Steam wanted to give refunds in such situations, that would be their choice, but Australian Laws does not give them a legal obligation to do so.
The ACL (Australian Consumer Laws) cover rights of
actual importance to consumers - in essence, the right to receive a product that truly does what it is advertised as saying it does. You're talking like a digital copy of a game cannot have distinct and provable faults, but anyone who googles the title "Aliens: Colonial Marines" will quickly find that to be entirely inaccurate. (The short: a gameplay trailer marked as 'actual gameplay footage' showed textures that were of higher quality than those that could be achieved in the game itself.) The ACL covers situations like that one - factually inaccurate representations of a product give the consumer the legal right to receive a refund from the retailer. There are thousands of other situations that mirror this:
What if a game legitimately doesn't work on it's minimum given system specs?
What if a game specifies it has Co-Op multiplayer, then proves to only have PvP multiplayer?
What if a game promises 200 hours of gameplay, then only takes 100 hours to see all the content?
What if a game fails to announce anywhere that it can only be played online, given that the consumer may have bought it with the intention of playing it in situations where they do not have an internet connection?
There are certainly ways in which people can try to abuse this, but this system is the one already followed by (among others), Amazon, Itunes, and GoG (which suffers issues of 'just having it's library copied' much worse than DRM-happy Steam ever would). They still sell to Australian markets, so I would have to assume that they still find doing so to be profitable, despite being required to be morally decent if they sell digital content that is legitimately inaccurate.
The ACL are probably the most effective laws that still are clear to understand that I could name. I won't lie and say there aren't ways people could try to abuse it, or that retailers are happy about being legally required to be decent human beings, but in my book this is exactly where consumer versus retail rights should lie. While arguably they aren't specifically geared toward digital products, the only issue I see is the current need for the damaged product to be returned to receive a full refund. There *is* a part of the laws which allows for a person to receive a partial refund and keep their original copy while doing so, but the amount that should be refunded in such circumstances is completely based on a judgment call between the consumer and the retailer.
Personally, the only change I can see being warranted is to remove the notion that something should be returned at all, both for physical and digital products; as has already been said, these are not 'I didn't like it, give me a refund' laws. They require something to be clearly wrong with the product that was provided. If I buy a shirt and it falls apart in it's first wash, the store isn't going to want it back; if a product has a Major fault (defined in the law as 'you would not have made the purchase had you known about it'), I don't see why I can't then both receive a full refund for the shirt, and use the faulty product as my cat's new bedding material. With minor faults, sure, the company may want their product back so it can be re-sold - but with digital content this is meaningless... half because they did not lose a copy by giving one to me, and half because Minor faults are the things that Steam is allowed to say 'wait for the dev to make a patch for it' about. (As long as said dev doesn't take too long to produce said patch, in which case the issue then would escalate to a Major one.)
This isn't even remotely similar to any of the issues around Copyright laws. The idea that Steam, somehow, does not have responsibilities toward consumers to whom it has sold games that do not meet their own propaganda is just... ridiculous. And, under Australian Law, legally false.
In an essentially unrelated point, while double checking my information, I found a video that managed to get a smile out of me, even if it proved essentially unrelated to the issue at hand. I can't say it worked all that well, and a lot of what it referenced is fairly Australia specific, but you do have to give the dears points for trying. The Ay-triple-Cee is, after all, essentially the Australian equivalent of the ACLU; you won't find any organization closer to unambiguously being 'The Good Guys'*. Video below:
You must be registered to see the links
*With the exception of the Australian retail outlet chain which is
actually named 'The Good Guys'.
...Come in and see the good good good guys~
Pay cash and we'll slash the prices~
Come in and see the good, GOOD, good guys...
