I was not given a refund when MH World launched on PC in a broken, framelocked, constantly disconnecting state.
I tried and I was not granted one.
Steam refused to issue refunds for a long, long time. In the end they started allowing refunds for everyone because governments started requiring it and it was easier to just allow them for everyone than having to do the legal footwork to have different policies based on geography.
Mmmm billionaire boot must be delicious
Steam is not a bad company but it is still a company that holds a lot of power, don’t forget that.
Yeah. I am a fan of valve but their complicity in cs:go skin gambling uhhh… gets worse and worse the more closely you look at it.
Its fair to appreciate the good they have done for linux and largely very consumer friendly business practices AND, companies are not your friends.
Valve’s “hands-off” approach extends far beyond CS:GO gambling. They have the same willful negligence toward moderating their own official group chats.
For weeks, the official Steam Deck group chat has been flooded with racist slurs and hate speech. I and many others reported the individuals responsible, yet weeks passed with zero action taken.
Frustrated, I opened a formal support ticket. I detailed the offenses, provided evidence, and explained why a basic filtering system or active moderation is necessary for their own official spaces. Valve’s response? They closed my ticket without taking any action at all. They have confirmed, through inaction, that providing a non-toxic environment in their official communities is not a priority.
This experience has made me lose a significant amount of respect for Valve. I will now be actively purchasing my games elsewhere in protest.
At least they are not beholden to parasitic shareholders that demand quarterly grow at all costs.
Steam has had this power for ages tho and never abused it to the disadvantage of customers.
Supporting companies that don’t shit on consumers is equally important as boycotting companies that do.
Hmmm. Everyone takes Steam refunds for granted now. But until late 2015 they refused to do refunds for any kind of game purchase, even if the game was literally unplayable by buyers - until they were dragged through the courts by the ACCC and fined, with similar legal demands happening from the EU around the same time.
Dunno if I’d call that, “never abused their power to the disadvantage of customers”.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/australia-fines-valve-over-steam-refunds
That is not true. I know this because I had one case where I did get a refund for a game called “War Z” - I also found an article that explains that the game was pulled by valve and they have indeed offered refunds: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-not-to-launch-a-video-game-starring-i-the-war-z-i-
On the same site, I also found this article talking about a ubisoft game that was pulled: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-ubisoft-offering-refunds-on-i-from-dust-i-through-steam
Now, it’s debateable if this was a valve or a ubisoft decision - however, knowing ubisoft, I’d say they were pressured by valve to give in lmao.
I’ve also found this article on polygon that talks about another Early Access Title that was pulled by valve and refunded to buyers because it was shit: https://www.polygon.com/2014/5/6/5686826/earth-year-2066-refund-steam-early-access/
And that’s just what I found with a few minutes of research. I’m fairly confident if I search some more, I’ll find much more of those cases.
So yes, while the stance back then was “all purchases are final”, you were absolutely able to get your money back if the game was truly broken and unplayable. Don’t get me wrong, the current rule is significantly better, but claiming that steam hasn’t been on customers side back then is just straightup wrong.
And I have an anecdote that counters your anecdote. I’ve been refused a refund. It was at their discretion. Game crashing withing 10 minutes of playing every time isn’t always enough to get them to deign to give you your money back…
So, yes, it IS true. Them occasionally making a PR friendly move and going against their own policy doesn’t change that
Their policy was that if a game was activated on your account then you were not entitled to a refund. The fact that they pulled some games from the store due to significant complaints about those individual titles (or at publisher request), and subsequently decided to make an exception to refund that particular game for some people does not disprove that their standard policy was ‘you are not entitled to a refund’.
Yes, it’s better to have companies that have no power and do nothing.
Exactly, and Steam is not a bad company… yet.
And if they get rid of most of the competition then they can treat us like garbage and we’d have nowhere to go.
If Valve would want to do that, they could have done so years ago. To the contrary, there are more stores where you can buy games online then ever before (Epic, Windows Store, GOG, Itch.io, Fanatical, Humble and so on, with steam keys and without), and i haven’t heard of a single aqcuisition by Valve yet.
What competition lol
It seems from your response that you have at least some desire to educate… Why must that also come with derision?
It isn’t that hard to convey a message without such a contemptuous tone, and I’d venture to guess it would be more likely to persuade. Someone has seen some good in a thing. You can disagree without scorn.
My apologies, this community is generally memey/jokey in tone, and I was going with that. /gen
I’m also firing off dumb comments at like 2 am where I am, lol. Please do not take my short soundbites (text bites?) seriously.
On a more serious note, one billion dollars is a legitimately unfathomable amount of wealth and, by extension, unilateral power. That’s a dangerous thing for any one person to hold, regardless of how kind their heart is since it means the use of that power is dependent on the whims of one person.
Corporations are also, by their nature, driven by a profit motive. A corporation can do non-evil, customer-friendly things but that can also change very quickly. It’s important to differentiate between beneficial behavior and altruism.
Also, I typically don’t expect people to read my unsolicited soapboxing rants under a green text meme lol.
Also also, I am quite appreciative of the benefits of Valve’s efforts. I just don’t assume they’re purely doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do I expect/demand them to.
I’ve lurked on Lemmy for over a year and this post, for whatever reason, compelled me to register an account to respond; I took your comment to be a tad critical. It seems I may’ve misread the room here - my apologies if so. I agree wholeheartedly with pretty much all you’ve said. Thanks for the response.
Your concerns are valid since text is hard to interpret due to lack of inflection, context, and other intonation indicators. I try to remember to use tone tags but don’t always.
Thank you for your thoughtful responses and engagement, though. Good faith discussion is an important thing on the web, and is a large part of why I like Lemmy over Reddit and other centralized social media sites. I appreciate you for that and adding to the constructiveness and positivity :) /gen
Unfortunately gaming might already be dead with these RAM prices and Micron giving up on the consumer space. Unless Valve wants to start buying chips wholesale and selling DIMM and SODIMM modules.
Eh, ram prices will drop again when the ai bubble bursts
Talks about AI bubble burst been there a long time. I sure hope it will happen tomorrow, but I really wouldn’t put my bets on that happening any time soon.
A long time? It’s only been in full swing for like ~2 years now. That is not a long time for financial bubbles.
They are talking about bubble popping soon for 2 years except AI is older than that. For a bubble to burst - 2 years is not very long time. How is to have one talking point for 2 years is not a long time?
The AI investment craze wasn’t going on the whole time even LLMs have been around. There will be people calling out doomsday financial scenarios every day for years that never happen.
Some have been proclaiming daily we’re overdue for another recession ever since we hit the bottom of the 2008 one. Hasn’t happened yet, 17 years later.
I think this is factually wrong, Steam only introduced refunds because they were forced to for the European market
No, the EU doesn’t force refunds for software
Not explicitly, but 2011/83/EC does state that it applies to everything but “financial services, gambling, healthcare by regulated professionals, package travel, property transactions, social services, timeshare and most aspects of passenger transport” and reservers. And steam’s refund policy is most likely a reaction to this. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0083, which mentions the 14 days basically everywhere as a default withdrawal period.
The current version, at article 16, also includes software:
contracts for the supply of digital content which is not supplied on a tangible medium if the performance has begun
Didn’t spot that, thanks
I believe it was Australia
Valve is king of kiddie gambling. They are rich so why they money grubbing. Pathetic company.
the games with lootboxes that valve owns are not for kids, and their parents should be the ones that make sure they don’t get addicted to gambling by not buying loot boxes for their kids.
Valve does literally the bare minimum to avoid getting sued. They’ve probably spent millions of dollars on the salaries for lawyers and psychologists to come up with a new gambling system that bypasses the laws since lootboxes are being regulated all over.
Pull your head out of the sand.
and valve is supposed to parent kids, not their actual parents? valve can be good or evil, it doesn’t change the fact that parents should take better care of their kids
It seems like everyone has already forgotten how he introduced gambling to kids.
both tf2 and cs aren’t games for kids. if the kids’ parents let them play those games and spend real money on them, that’s the parents’ fault for letting their kids do that.
nahhh, lootboxes existed before CS:GO or TF2. and neither was supposed to be for kids in the first place! card games like MTG were one of the first mass created to use those mechanics
you know what was supposed to be for kids, had (& still has) lootboxes galore and other predatory monetisation tactics? Wizard101 (2008)
i don’t see many people complaining about MtG or Wizard101, but folks love to point out how Gaben did a bad thing by taking something that was already a concept (that people liked) and making it digital, whereby he accidentally created something he could never uncreate
I have to disagree. Loot boxes definitely existed before CS:GO and TF2, but Valve has still been really predatory about it, dodging regulation and refusing to seriously address the issues in CS for years now. The recent update they did that cut down the CS market was a step in the right direction but far too late imo.
still doesn’t change the fact that that’s not a game for kids, and the adults for whom that game was made can make as many bad decisions with their money as they can afford
i’m not in favour of gambling for children don’t get me wrong, in fact i was once a victim of it (thanks to wizard101, a game advertised as and marketed for children), but Valve just did not enage in that. if a child is playing a game that’s clearly marked “M” or “PEGI 18” then it’s the parents’ responsibility to figure out if its something appropriate for their child
Believing that sales exist to save people money is the funniest shit i have ever seen.
2 words though “Kiddie gambling”.
Sure Steam is one of the less evil companies out there, but they’re far from innocent.
I suspect translation later for ARM will be industry shaking
“Sells hardware at a loss to hook you into the steam ecosystem and make more money by selling you software” FTFY
Don’t get me wrong, as companies go I like valve, but to say they aren’t making decisions based on making more money and just out of altruistic motives is madness. Businesses that aren’t healthy and competitive die, even if they have rabid fans.
Steam deck supports Xbox live streaming, gog, epic via lutris and heroic. It’s about as far from a locked down ecosystem as one could possibly get.
Never said it was locked. But being locked or unlocked doesn’t change the motivation and is irrelevant to my point. The more people on the steam ecosystem, the better for them. It is far easier to use steam on the steam deck than any of the options you put forward. Even so, not preventing their use means people are more likely to buy the steam deck, which in turn means they are more likely to use steam as their primary store.
Epic, etc are not a default and at the beginning were not easy to get working.
Oh and you got it the wrong. Those things support the steam deck (usually via third party hacks), the steam deck doesn’t support them, it you would be able to install them from the steam store with tight integration into the library by default. It just doesn’t prevent them. That is a BIG difference. But yes, doing similar things on other hardware might not be possible or at least as easy. I’m grateful their are so many enthusiasts out there making such things possible.
I quite explicitly named lutris and heroic which are 3rd party apps. These apps are installable via Discover which is the app store running on the OS. I’d agree the wording could be seen as ambiguous.
Sony and Xbox do NOT support any other app stores on their devices - I think the use of support is clear and understandable in this statement.
Yes Discover is part of the Linux distro, not the valve added value. It is by virtue of their choice to base on an established Linux rather than anything. Again lutris and heroic both support steam deck not the other way around.
But none of this changes my original point. Valve wasn’t you to use the steam store. The stream deck is a tool to get you to do that. You are free to bypass because they don’t stop you, but they are willing to take a loss on hardware because they know it means more sales on the steam store. Or they wouldn’t be here much longer.
You seem to think if I were to write an app for Windows and release it tomorrow that it means Microsoft support my app.
You seem to think if I were to write an app for Windows and release it tomorrow that it means Microsoft support my app.
I did not say that at all.
The road outside my house supports cars, lorries, bicycles and foot traffic. If I breakdown on that road the local govt. will not come and fix my car.
I understand now. You are using the general definition of support so we are taking about different things.
I am a fan of Valve, but this is just way exaggerated. For example, encourages you to save money by having sales? Isn’t that about manipulating you into buying more games than you would otherwise, because you perceive the value as being better?
Yeah, Valve are certainly one of the best options for buying games other than sometimes GoG or directly from the developer. But this level of simping for Valve is odd.
Right? The best method of saving money is not to spend it in the first place, no matter how good the deal is. I mean, good deals are nice and all if you really need a thing.
Where I am, games in Steam cost about five to ten bucks normally, and two or three bucks on sale. Ten bucks goes quite far here, and without sales many wouldn’t buy games at all. Now, is it good value to buy games instead of not buying any?
They don’t set the prices. Developers and Publishers of the game are the ones that do that.
PlayStation has been known to straight up limit and even DENY developers and publishers of indie games on their platform but its strange I never see hate for them very much. And they also have crazy sales on AAA games too.
I fall for it every time and I couldn’t be more proud
What brainwashed G*mer sheep
Defending the monopolistic.
Loot box pushing
Gambling economy boosting
Seasonal FOMO instigator
Broken game seller
Asset flips exploiter
Refund pusher backer (he pushed hard against it from the start until the EU told them to fuck off with that shit)
monopolistic? what even is a monopoly anyway? afaik there are a bunch of alternatives for steam.
loot box pushing. yeah, they do that unfortunately. though parents should really take better care of their children, so that they don’t get addicted to gambling.
what is a Seasonal FOMO instigator?
steam sells whstever people pay to put in the store. if the game is broken you can review it badly and ask for a refund.
what is an assets flip exploiter?
and even if they pushed against the current refund policy, they do have one of the best refund policies for customers afaik.
I knew you’d be here. And with bad takes as usual.
For as long as G*mers are mindless monopoly defending sheep. I’ll never rest.
Fuck G*mers
seasonal FOMO instigator
Lol give me a break… Look, Gabe is a billionaire and yes that puts him on “piece of shit” scale. But it seems you really had to dig deep to think of things here. Seasonal FOMO instigator? Really?
Trying to bring up the seasonal item drops in games like TF2, while still keeping the rhythm of the rest of the comment is quite hard.
If you have a better way of putting it I’m all ears.
How about just leave it out entirely
Yeah, I was never a fan of Tim Sweeney
I was extremely impressed that Valve did an RMA replacement for one of my Index base stations even out of warranty. They explicitly did not have to do that. It’s been years but I’m still amazed
Yeah my white OLED Steam Deck broke (it was definitely my fault), and they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. Also white OLED, after you couldn’t even buy them anymore.
Guys I know he is not perfect but it’s understandable that people like him in a world where the average CEO drinks the blood of newborns daily.
Huh, so that’s why they’re all so prolife. Need to keep the source of fresh babies going…
“Don’t get an abortion! Have that baby and dispose of it at your nearest “Leave your baby here for our coalition of friendly CEOs to take care of” location for a 25$ amazon gift card!”
That fully sounds like a program a literal vampire would implement with wild success. Parents selling their kids for money happened in the past, so not even that much of a stretch. It does sound like a potential cobra problem though.
Would watch a full length film of this
very literal cobra problem as well
