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December 2025

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[Sonic4Ever]

Account deactivation is automatic when an account is tagged as in debt

^^ That. Its an automated process, which protects valve against scripted fraudulent purchases. Most e-commerce will have it.  Log-in to buy, dodgy sale?, account locked out.  It's just unfortunate it encomapasses your ability to play games in valves case.

The only fault is the lack of proactive response from valve.

Maybe they are understaffed, maybe they don't care, who knows....

They could just disable your steam shopping privileges instead

[mandl]

Id send a follow up email detailing what you lost in terms of gameplay time, correpondence time anguish at having xx pounds of games you owned locked away from you etc to valve support.
Include the details fo the correspondence.
Ask for some financial recompense to help restore your shattered confidence in buying games or recomending using steam to buy games. Id point them to this thread valve are well aware of the power of tinternet.

[mode_seven]

this kindof thing shouldn't happen on credit cards. Its paypal and services like it

Aye, Credit Cards are in general a good way to go about online transactions. If anything goes wrong you have recourse to get your bank/building society etc. involved, who willl have significantly more clout.

[discordance]

I was horrified today to see EA respecting the very EU laws valve are still ignoring.

By law, customers in the European Union have the right to withdraw from this purchase within 14 calendar days after the date of purchase. Please note that you will lose your right of withdrawal if you start downloading your purchase before the end of this time period or if you remove or unseal the shrink-wrap packaging from your physical product. See Terms of Sale for details.

slightly different wording here but basically the same
http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/termsofsale/US/en/PC/

Note that EA legally consider commencement of service to be when you start downloading.

[Zarf]

But the EA download service doesn't matter. I can only stand to have one proprietary marketplace service on my PC, and that has to be Steam.

[discordance]

yes but my point is I want steam to be better, I want them to comply with EU law and implemenent refunds. To stop setting stupid RRPs pricing out retail stores like amazon. To stop using stupid vac bans, and account disabling, to implement better security blah blah. I'm not going to leave steam so I want them to shape up.

[Zarf]

It's publishers who set the prices, not Steam. They want you to buy boxed games due to (I can only assume) back-hander deals with the retailers. All the conventional economics would allow them to charge less on Steam (in order to sell as many as possible - Publishers make around 10-20% on retail sales, but 60% on steam sales, so you'd think they'd want everyone to buy their game from Steam). With digital distribution they also don't have to worry about the second hand or rental market which aren't profitable for them.

[Power]

It's publishers who set the prices, not Steam.

That is not quite correct, the pricing problem is Steam-global. You can easily see that it's not true, by comparing the price on Valves own products, it's the same story there. Compare http://store.steampowered.com/app/220/?cc=uk and http://store.steampowered.com/app/220/?cc=de. There have been different responses from different developers on pricing policies but Valve does have some say in what the prices are (at least they can suggest what the price should be). The reason for the overpricing is correct, though. If Steam would drive prices competitive to retail all the time, retail would die and the publishers don't want that (at least not yet). I think it has something to do with the fact, that when retail offers a copy, the publishers already made the sale, so they don't care if it just sits on retailers shelves since they already got the money. It's not the same with steam as far as I'm aware, but I might be wrong.

[Leftism]

Steam's money is spent having to host games on their servers. One could argue that every title on Steam is "losing" some of their money each day so there is probably more incentive for a higher price than in retail where part where customer buys the product instore is long before the publisher loses money (through discs and boxes) - Like Power says, once a publisher has sold it's product to a retail outlet it's no longer their problem in terms of getting it to the customer's hands.

Presumably, Publishers will pay a certain amount of money to Valve/Steam each month/year for hosting their games on their store. As much as I enjoy Steam, Steam Cloud and SteamWorks there should be an option asks if the user wishes for this to be installed; although knowing the DRM-obsessed publishers these days it probably won't happen.

[CruelCow]

That money lost is probably peanuts compared to producing (too many of) the boxes, the cut for the retailer, the cut for the carrier etc.
Also, digital distribution allows for late sales: How many stores will still stock cod4? Probably none. But I bought it last week from steam.

And interesting thought IMHO is this one: Will we still need publishers once digital distribution takes over?

[DeadlyAvenger]

That money lost is probably peanuts compared to producing (too many of) the boxes, the cut for the retailer, the cut for the carrier etc.
Also, digital distribution allows for late sales: How many stores will still stock cod4? Probably none. But I bought it last week from steam.

And interesting thought IMHO is this one: Will we still need publishers once digital distribution takes over?

Also - won't retailers buy the game in bulk from the publisher - so even if it's rubbish, they've already made the profit from it regardless of how well it sells and this is why they end up being cheap because they still have copies that they need to get rid of?

With digital distribution they have no idea how many sales there will be etc.

[Finaldeath]

I agree with discordance, it needs to be bloody improved.

Leftism, a bit wrong I think - the cost to run such an operation surely is within the bounds of what they take as a cut for each game sale else they would already be bust (I recall numbers being 25% or so? 50%? It's all in the dark since the contacts say you can't tell anyone, I might dig something up if I had the time). If Amazon can still provide cheaper prices and comply with EU law (with a much much greater stress on their servers and cost to run such servers) then why can't Steam? If EA can do it while being higher priced and still being competitive (in other ways) why can't Steam?

Steamworks isn't the DRM anyway, and there is an option to turn off Steam Cloud per-game - the DRM has been there since Day 1 in the client. VAC is another matter entirely, and I hate the VAC bans as shown here too.

Cruelcow - Publishers also have a minuscule cost in the actual product (boxed or digital distribution) - they sort supply and demand pretty satisfactorily usually (I've never heard a news story about games being dumped because they're worthless or over produced for instance). Prices would have to be in the pennies region to get in the range of losing money because it physically cost a lot to produce, it's done on such a big scale. It adds up - the distribution network and retailers - but obviously Steam charge comparative rates, essentially as proven for worse service.

Probably needs things to be taken to court to properly get the operation in line with something consumer friendly other then quite frankly abysmal "by website" customer support, supporting refunds of any kind (especially if it doesn't run on your PC so isn't fit for purpose - just wait for a really dodgy release you've pre-ordered eh?), or anything else.

[Teatime]

And interesting thought IMHO is this one: Will we still need publishers once digital distribution takes over?

If it's anything like the movie industry I guess the publishers (unless it's merely a distributor) will do some of the financial lifting. I doubt many developers can afford production costs of 6-7 figures on their own.

[DeadlyAvenger]

Necrrrooooooooo but relevant.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Valve-Allows-Banned-Players-Games,15447.html

Accounts are now no-longer disabled when you get banned from Steam - you just can't trade/buy games/redeem codes.

[Teh Fluff]

Necrrrooooooooo but relevant.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Valve-Allows-Banned-Players-Games,15447.html

Accounts are now no-longer disabled when you get banned from Steam - you just can't trade/buy games/redeem codes.

So could you still play TF2/L4D(2) which is heavily integrated with steam?