I can show you politicians still in power in european countries that got rich by "organ farms" and harvesting pows. Life is imperfect.

That is for sure :) Valve are just adding some normal option to their service. Nothing more ;)

The account-ban was meant to apply to the fraud not the cheating in my post, I apologize for being unclear. I was trying to write about both in one post and conflated them more than was meant.

No an SSA that you sign should emphatically not allow them to totally kill your account - if they refund your money, everything you paid for the games in the amount you paid for it, that's more acceptable. But is there any evidence that they do? I've never heard of Steam giving refunds to banned accounts. This is a case of Steam selling me the bicycle and then stealing it back. Steam can't steal my bicycle and if they do I can take them to court over it. :)

Steam's service is selling me games. They can refuse to sell me more games. They can refuse to accept payment from my CC or my IP or whatever they like. They can ban me from their MP-secured servers. All that is totally fine. However, they should not be able to take away my access to my games - except for those games which I purchased fraudulently (obviously no refund needed then!).

I don't fault Valve anymore than any other company that does this. Valve is simply the biggest player, but let's face it, EA beat them to it on this front about being more customer friendly. The industry has become very anti-consumer and assumed itself to have more power over consumers than they have any right to have - and often in the name of beating pirates and used sales. This is one small step in the right direction and while Valve was beaten to it by a competitor, they should be applauded for taking it ... and condemned for having had to take it in the first place.

Due to the fact that the SSA is a seperate legal enttiy (so to say) from the actual game license purchase, they have to refund you the games you bought, if they cancel the SSA. If they haven't done this so far, it only means that they haven't given anybody the reason to actually drag them to court for it. That is why I think most downright complete account bans were justified enough, otherwise the legal shitstorm would have been to big. There were probably a couple of "settlements" which were combined with non disclosure agreements. Steam simply can't afford a proper trial, they have way to much at risk. So far Steam has only gone to the courts (in Germany) once, and then it was the very concept that was challenged. Everything else they do out of court.

There service is not only selling games. They provide Steam as a service. You need Steam to run your games, and if they think they have the legal rights to cancel your SSA than they can do that. But they have to refund you any losses you have from this. How hight this refund is going to be is very, very debatable.

Steam is seller and service provider and every purchase let's you agree to both an EULA and a SSA. That is how Steam actually can work as a DRM in Germany for retail games.

This is one of those instances where a company should have to be "nice" - they actually shouldn't have a choice in this matter. Offering free extras or other perks? Yup, that's optional. This shouldn't be optional.

I see the Steam apologists are out in full force.

If Valve has finally decided to stop breaking the law by preventing people from using their legally acquired licences, then kudos to them. Credit given where credit due. If I buy X game in January without any problems, then I buy Y game in July with a credit card, and that card company charges it back for whatever reason, those are two different contracts. Valve was breaking the law in pretty much every jurisdiction - including the United States - by suspending access to an unrelated purchase.

This doesn't address the problem however that it was and still is possible to remotely block people from their legally purchased games in the first place. It's a fundamental problem with Steam that will not go away until Steam games are uncoupled from the Steam client, or at least until the Steam client can be operated independently of the Steam servers.

Not quite. The SSA is what you agree to when you sign up for the Steam service. You agree a separate EULA for each game. With a lot of current triple-A games on Steam these days, that EULA pops up in a window when you enter the Steam key.

So while Valve is within their rights to suspend or lock your Steam account, it is not within their rights to prevent you from accessing your game purchases. Legally a bit of a contradiction in terms, but you still have the right to demand access to your games.

Correction, "suspected" stolen accounts, "suspected" scamming, etc. They won't even go so far as to provide proof. They can still pretty much do what they want with your account for any reason and without the need to justify that reason to the person it will effect.

They didn't do this because they wanted to be nice. They did this because somebody in their legal department told them to do so already! Only "consumer lazyness" prevented them from major legal troubles if only a fraction of the stories are true.


And this is why they need to provide refunds. They cannot revoke licenses for purchased games. It get's especially complicated with games bought on Amazon or GG.
But their "intransperency" is also their biggest weakness. If they ban my account and don't tell me why within a reasonable time, all my legal costs to recover the account are covered.

The cancellation of the service should not cover my access to my games. Steam is not required to run most if not all (including Steamworks) single-player games and even many multi-player games allow access to non-Steam servers.

The fact that Steam is now officially making this change shows that they believed they could do this before regardless of how many times they actually did it - and it was more than just handful. Again, it does not matter one whit if the account in question did exactly what they said it did.

They should never have held the belief that they could remove all access to my games in the first place and it should never held up in court. That is not an acceptable way to conduct commerce in a civilized, capitalist society.

How high the refund should be is not debatable to me. It's everything you paid to them. After all if that was a question ... I could refund them $0.01 and claim I gave you a refund. Thus the refund and canceling the SSA would be of no matter.

EDIT: jamyskis covered my points better than I and you already responded to him, so simply ignore this post ... wow I'm slow at typing!

That's what I'm trying to get across with they "have to be nice" - i.e. because it's the law :). They had a business practice which was anti-consumer and frankly illegal.

It never did, because it never went before a court. That's what I'm saying. Steam went the "full ban" way because they apperently had no other way of protecting themselves. It took them long enought to actually notice that this made them highly liable in courts. (quite ironic, because doing nothing made them also highly liable from another angle). They had to choose between to poisons. And they probably rather took the legal risk with a few angry gamers than, let's say "VISA".

This change in policy means only one thing, we will see more resticted accounts and not less banned ones. The ones that got banned before will still get banned, because they need to be as sure nowadays as they needed to be back then. The "restricting option" allows them to get active in more foggy cases, because they can do so now with less legal risk. Why they didn't think of this 5 years ago is beyond me.

Problem is, how many people who have had this happen, are going to be able to get a lawyer who not only understands the situation but is willing to help (and that is affordable)? Might be easier in the US/UK, but here, that's not likely at all.

For that matter, if I could afford to hire a lawyer (and find one capable) I'd have contested Valve's practice of misinforming customers about regional restrictions and their hidden IP blocks a long time ago...

I didn't think it had gone to court, but I thought from this statement you were saying it had: I couldn't believe full bans of this nature were held up in court, but I thought you were saying here that they were. I guess you were saying simply the Steam DRM was upheld in court?

I also have trouble believing that in 8 & 1/2 years they didn't have any other protection from fraud than full bans. Either way you cut it, that's either incompetence or callousness. And Valve doesn't strike me as stupid. :)


Look I'm glad they did this before they got dragged into court, but when something like this is considered a victory, it's indicative of how far we have to go in ensuring consumer rights for digital products and services.

The irony in this comment is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Who has the money to mess with Valve because he or she lost access to his or her games because of something he or she did?