Who knows? But Valve has blacklisted my debit card so I can't exactly purchase a new steam account, and even if I could, it would be pointless because I'd be banned the moment I identified myself any place I might be able to reach her.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Violating my legal rights wasn't enough for good guy Valve. They also arbitrarily decided they also have the absolute right to interfere with my love life, and the DOJ concurred.
" ...
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By
Tim Colwill
May 16, 2017, 10:45 AM EDT
Opinion
The illusion behind the “Good Guy Valve” reputation
Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization.
More on how Polygon writes opinion pieces.
The drive to be on the bleeding edge of technology powers the PC gaming community. We want nothing more than to run our ridiculously powerful rigs on barely stable beta drivers, with our CPUs overclocked to speeds that are neither advisable nor guaranteed to be safe for our systems.
It’s a good match for the ship-first-iterate-later approach of major Silicon Valley companies who want to expand at all costs and don’t care what it takes.
But companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Fiverr and the others are starting to feel the risk of that edge. The world is finally realizing that a hands-off, profit-first, tax-dodging “connection and services platform,” powered by the cheap labor of people who aren't technically employees and have no rights isn't exactly a good idea. In fact, it may be a very bad one. Whether this means government regulators finally getting their act together, unions winning court cases or citizens voting them out of town, these companies are starting to feel the downside of moving fast and breaking things.
If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation. They’d not only be caught dead before helping a company like that come to power, they might even join the resistance to stop them.
And yet, that sort of operation is exactly what the PC gaming community has been supporting, promoting and defending since 2004 when Valve more or less forced us to install Steam by bundling it with Half-Life 2.
Behind the smile
Valve didn’t always seem like the sort of corporation which thought of its customers as meaningless numbers in a colossal profit machine. How could it be, with its fierce and innovative vision for digital distribution, its stable of influential first-party titles and its approachable, meme-friendly CEO? "Look," we said to each other, "you can send Gabe Newell a funny email, and
he may respond with a joke!
What a good guy. Valve is good."
Perhaps Good Guy Valve did exist, at one time. But beneath the glassy smile of Good Guy Valve today lurks an altogether
more cold and corporate beast, a textbook
rent-seeker that is profiting from both hostile practices and a bizarrely customer-supported near monopoly on PC game sales.
Steam looked very different in 2004
Reddit
It seems increasingly unlikely that Good Guy Valve ever existed. Good Guy Valve is a clever marketing conceit, a machine operating on a massive scale and one that can only do so because it is powered by the one thing Valve would later come to exploit above all: the free labor of adoring users and consumer goodwill that often feels both unearned and bottomless.
Valve controls an unprecedented slice of the PC gaming industry, and there can be no doubt that the power behind the throne is, and always has been, us. Good Guy Valve worked hard to make us believe that willingly installing surveillance and control software onto our computers was a morally benevolent, perhaps even righteous act — and we swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
All of this began when Valve released an easy way to keep Counter-Strike updated. And then Valve figured out it could get a lot of people using the software by making it a mandatory part of Half-Life 2.
Here’s what ExtremeTech wrote in 2004:
In an unusual first for PC games, Half-Life 2 will require some form of Internet access upon installation, Valve Software’s Doug Lombardi confirmed today.
“All versions require an Internet connection upon installation” to prove the legitimacy of a player’s copy, Lombardi said. “This is for authentication/anti-piracy purposes. Once this has been completed, the owner of either the retail or the Steam version can play Half-Life 2 single player in offline mode.”
We were so young then.
Remember that even the retail version of Half-Life 2 required the installation of Steam, which means any store that sold PC software was selling you their doom with every copy of the game.
Anyone who wasn't immediately convinced it was worth it only needed a few minutes with Half-Life 2 to see the error of their ways, reaching for the gravity gun to hurl a toilet into the face of a Combine soldier, leaving the EULA unread and untouched but agreed-upon nonetheless. Innovative titles like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead cemented the decision, reassuring us that our lopsided relationship with Valve had more benefits than it did drawbacks. It was convenient. It worked. We didn’t need to think about it.
Valve bought our loyalty with cloud-saves and
claims of piracy as a customer service issue. Steam gave a lot back in the early days, even when it was laying down the tracks for a lot of questionable decisions in the future. We also didn’t want anything else once we were comfortable with Steam, which is a big problem for anyone who doesn’t want
to give Valve a third of every sale.
Get ‘em while they’re young
Steam’s near monopoly has always been happily supported by players and even the press.
EA launched its Origin client in 2011, and demanded that we install it if we wanted to play Battlefield 3. Our collective Stockholm Syndrome for Steam kicked in en masse, and we rained hellfire on this “greedy corporation” for its temerity.
“It seems like the only redeeming feature of Origin is all the free stuff they give away,”
a forum post from two years ago states. “Getting the Titanfall DLC for free was great and same with some old classic PC games like Wing Commander. But when you step back and look at the situation, it just doesn't make sense. They are giving away games, refunding the broken ones, and trying to manage all of this through a poorly designed digital game service. It only makes sense when you remember that EA is a greedy company that just wants more money and more power, which they seem to lust after in an almost blinded like fashion.”
There is almost a sense from the writing in 2011 that everyone should just roll over and accept Steam. Not wanting to give another company a big chunk of your revenue in order to use their store is characterized as wanting “more money and more power.”
“Developers have sometimes complained about Valve’s hegemony in digital distribution and wished for seriously competitive alternatives,”
Geek.com wrote. “It appears that EA is taking this possibility very seriously with Origin, but it won’t exactly be to gamers’ benefit if in three years’ time all gaming PCs are running stores from Valve, EA, Blizzard, and Ubisoft at all times just so that players can access their purchases.”
Valve had all your information and was tracking your data, but it would be wrong for other companies to do so. Valve takes 30 percent of each sale on Steam, but anyone who wants to keep their own revenue is seen as “greedy.”
Look into the face of the devilOrigin
Looking back, it's strange to think how quickly even the most vocal Steam-haters came to terms with the idea of keeping Valve’s software on their computer. Eight short years after feeling concern about one forced DRM installation, we suddenly had nothing but vile contempt for another, as if being forced to use one particular monopoly-surveillance-control channel was the most natural thing in the world, but the existence of a second is untenable.
Steam is Good, and Origin is Bad. Steam is run by Good Guy Valve, and Origin is the devilspawn of EA, the Evil Corporation Who Doesn't Care About You. We know these things to be true ... right?
No sale, no ownership, no refunds
We all eventually discovered that our close, personal and entirely fictional relationship with Valve did not entitle us to any kind of refund on our purchases.
But it took the better part of a decade for enough people to start noticing that Steam's refund policy wasn't so much a “policy” as the words “eat shit and die” printed in huge size 72 font and to start raising hell about it. We were used to buying our PC games in stores, and we had recourse if they didn’t work. We could go talk to someone. Steam never provided that luxury, and it still doesn’t.
The occasional no-refund horror story was dismissed as the exception, not the rule. It didn’t cause near enough to damage the Good Guy Valve golden brand, and an incredible 11 years passed before enough people were possessed of enough indignant fury to actually complain to the authorities.
Players began noting that was Valve
was doing was wildly illegal, pointing out quite accurately that
under European Union law, consumers were entitled to a refund on all purchases — even for something as simple as changing their mind.
Valve used every trick in the book to stall the ongoing, inevitably damning case against it
Never one to shy away from a little thing like "breaking the law,” Good Guy Valve quickly came up with a solution: an entirely new EULA custom made for the good gamers of the European Union, which specifically acknowledges that they have a legal right to a refund ... and
then immediately forces them to waive it if they want to purchase the game.
Eighteen months of drama unfolded in the Australian Federal Court from 2014 through 2016, as the Washington software giant used every trick in the book to stall the ongoing, inevitably damning case against it.
Valve, backed into a corner and hissing like a cat that doesn't want to go to the vet,
pulled out all the stops to avoid providing the required financial information — to the point where a seemingly infuriated and exasperated Judge Edelman blasted Valve for “overkill” and
issued the most politely worded legalese version of “go to hell” that anybody has ever committed to paper.
“If Valve’s private financial information is made public, Valve submits that it could make negotiations with potential business partners more difficult,” the company tried to argue. The implication is that, were anyone to find out how incredibly lucrative Steam had become, they might negotiate harder. The judge wasn’t having it.
“Even without examining the details of Valve’s net profits, it is very difficult to see how any disclosure that Valve is a highly profitable business will come as a great surprise to any fraudster, third party game developer, potential business partner, patent troll, or supplier,”
Judge Edelman wrote. “There are related matters to profitability that are already public information, which were discussed without any suggestion of confidentiality in the liability hearing. Those matters include that Valve has approximately 2.2 million subscriber accounts in Australia and that it operates in many countries worldwide.”
Unsurprisingly, Good Guy Valve's defense — that they “don't operate a business in Australia,” they only sell things to Australians and take their money in return — also didn't hold up in court. In a landmark decision that set a precedent for establishing digital software as “goods,” Edelman ruled that Valve was in clear violation of Australian law and
needed to cough up $3 million in fines. The language was damning.
Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view … that it was not subject to Australian law … and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
A landmark victory to be sure, but when even the most conservative estimates value Valve at more than $3 billion (and that was in 2015), it's hard to imagine that Newell felt any kind of sting.
Even when Valve
finally did get around to launching a refund program (a full two years after the supposedly evil
EA did it!), many people quite accurately and angrily observed that the default refund option was in Steam credit, which means
Valve wins either way. It's almost like Good Guy Valve just ... doesn't want you to have your money back.
The language Valve uses on Steam to this day reflects the pouty attitude
the company has towards its loss in court.
European law principally provides a right of withdrawal on software sales. However, it can be and typically is excluded for boxed software that has been opened and for digitally provided content once it has been made available to the end user. This is what happens when you make a transaction on Steam: The EU statutory right of withdrawal ends the moment the content and services are added to your account.
At the same time, Steam voluntarily offers refunds to all of its customers worldwide in a way that is much more customer-friendly than our legal obligations. You can find the details here:
http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
But Gabe, I thought we were friends? ..."
Are you saying you're a criminal defendant, Naru?
I'm saying considering the circumstances under which I'm currently posting, I face the threat of retaliation from Kiwi Farmers.
