Valve sued by French consumer association

[tal onzy]

angus morrison pc gamer

A change in refund policy has not been enough to convince everyone that Valve is doing all it should to, er, follow consumer protection law. French consumer rights group, UFC Que Choisir, which litigates on behalf of the public, is suing Valve over certain clauses in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that it believes are in breach of French law.



As you might expect, the official source is in French, but the key points have been translated courtesy of Redditor Silencement. The UFC alleges five points in particular:
•Steam's Subscriber Agreement explicitly forbids users to sell their games, despite the transfer of ownership of digital products/licenses being legal.
•Valve declines responsibility in the event that users' personal information is stolen.
•Valve claims ownership of the rights of any user-created content uploaded to Steam.
•It is impossible to get the money on your Steam Wallet back if your account is closed/deleted/banned.
•Valve applies Luxembourg's consumer law regardless of the user's country.

This is not the first time that Valve's blanket approach to international consumers' rights has led to court proceedings—the outcome of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's ongoing suit over Valve's refund policy and customer support is expected in March 2016.

 

[boxmouth1]

Luxembourg? Why would they do that lol. Sounds to me like Valve is gonna lose that lawsuit but I'm not gonna lie I still love using steam. It's just nice and clean looking.

I feel like we should sue uplay and origin just for being annoying and looking stupid.

 

[tal onzy]

Luxembourg? Why would they do that lol. Sounds to me like Valve is gonna lose that lawsuit but I'm not gonna lie I still love using steam. It's just nice and clean looking.

I feel like we should sue uplay and origin just for being annoying and looking stupid.

Box have a

• 

it is the Holidays so quit picking on the rich -Uplay And EA

PS the pic was made with a 3d printer and not mine

 

[crnppscls]

Luxembourg? Why would they do that lol. Sounds to me like Valve is gonna lose that lawsuit but I'm not gonna lie I still love using steam. It's just nice and clean looking.

I feel like we should sue uplay and origin just for being annoying and looking stupid.

In January 2015, a law was passed in the eu courts that the tax on digital goods should be applied in the country that the product bought in.
Before this happened, tax was deducted at where the product was bought from.
This is why large corps like Apple, Amazon etc have european hq's in Luxembourg, because the tax there can be as little as 3% for an e-book. Where the same book with the new law if bought in the u.k would have a 20% tax levy. Consumers were happy, goverment tax collectors were not.

It's not well thought out and hard to impliment because most eu states have different tax brackets and if anyone suffers it will be the consumer.
Luckily for Pc users, it is still possible to game cheaply thanks to global keys. Battlefront Deluxe ed (origin mexico) $45 Battlefront Deluxe ed (origin Sweden 25% tax) $89 . Of course the tax is only part of the equasion but it still sucks. Digital console games are automatically deducted at the correct rate. One of the reasons why e-store bought games are usually more expensive.

Getting back to Steam. They were asked along with Sony and Microsoft to provide a way of trading digitally bought games from consumer to consumer.
(Remembering they (Sony/Ms) were defeated when they tried to rip out the second-hand market totally)
None of them are playing ball. Valve did win a test case in 2014 in Germany about this issue.

 

[boxmouth1]

The cost difference of packaging vs digital is so extreme I can't believe Microsoft can sell Xbox digital games at the same price as a packaged game. The packaged game you can buy pre-owned and trade into the store once you're done too. The only reason to get digital is so that your disk can't get scratched, you don't have to leave your couch to get a game and it reduces the carbon footprint.

I remember back when I could let my friends borrow games and we'd all switch back and forth and everyone was happy. Game sales didn't suffer from sharing. Greedy companies just want to maximize the amount of income coming in.

These rich companies can hire teams of lawyers that work 24/7 to look for loopholes to **** the consumer.
1. Luxembourg
2. Non-trade of digital goods
3. International gifting of digital goods

It sucks we gotta just deal with letting these big gaming industry companies bully us by making abide to their shitty standards but then again that's why piracy is such an issue. I for one usually don't buy the big AAA games that cost 60 USD unless I am dying to play multiplayer. But then again my standards are different then others. Once a pirate, always a pirate.

 

[crnppscls]

It's bullshit mate and i can't express how angry it makes me.

"Would you like a season pass with that sir ?", "how about i insert the media you supplied up your anus and then beat you so hard with a baseball bat that it will appear from your mouth with all the dlc that is already developed for the next 18 months sir'

Man, i thought we were immune from that crap but i pre-ordered battlefront (origin mexico), i don't do pre-orders usually but i thought yeah, dice. gotta be worth a spin. Dude, some people have paid over $100 for that shit incl season pass and Ea are absolutely laughing.

The only thing that will save us is that Pc gaming is going through a renaissance period, in that current gen consoles are shit. They have a handful of decent games between them and get this, atm as you would've seen, the biggest selling point is that they have backward compatibility.
It would be funny if the console owners didn't jump on it and think it was really edgy and rad that they can play Skyrim. They're the culprits man, the franchise buyers of habit.

On your point of piracy, wtf happened to demo's ? Has it got to the point where a game sells just by overhyped wanky cinematics and bought off youtube bloggers. ****, i'm such a hypocrite because i bought battlefront. Show us what we are getting instead of buying us off with shitty pre-order bonuses. I hate franchises, i hate pre-order without beta experience and with that i also hate myself.

goodnight

 

[00201110967700]

Why ?

 

[alpalia]

we are pretty ... hard.. in france about money and about populace (peoples) .
and in same time, everybody here (at least company and valve as exempl) are all in money, money.... so its always a conflict.
we have too much taxes and shit everywhere, so what valve try is nothing different of that in a sens.

well, i cant explain good in english, but... its like : "we have rights, but we got bitten from everywhere and we cant do anything because they always are some.. exception that are not directly explained to the peoples"

yeah, thats the best i can explain .