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Valve has done a lot of great things for the PC platform over the years but consumer rights is unfortunately one of the company's short comings. Unlike Origin, Steam has a strict no refund policy, and the Australian Consumer Rights Commission is calling the company out on it by filing a lawsuit.
According to the ACCC, Valve's refund policy indicates that consumers are not entitled to a refund on any game sold via Steam under any circumstance. Additionally, Valve is said to have restricted statutory guarantees and warranties on goods that would be of acceptable quality.
Valve is not under any obligation to repair, replace or refund a game, instead, buyers with issues must contact game developers directly. Overall, this policy doesn't exactly comply with Australian laws:
“It is a breach of the Australian Consumer Law for businesses to state that they do not give refunds under any circumstances, including gifts and during sales,” said ACCC Chairman, Rod Sims. “Under the Australian Consumer Law, consumers can insist on a refund or replacement at their option if a product has a major fault.”
In a statement given to Kotaku, Valve stated that it is working to comply with Australian law:
“We are making every effort to cooperate with with the Australian officials on this matter, while continuing to provide Steam services to our customer across the world, including Australian gamers.”
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KitGuru Says: Valve's lack of support for basic consumer rights is something that has been largely overlooked by gamers for the longest time. Hopefully we will see some of Steam's refund policies change thanks to this, after all, how many of you guys have wasted money on a game that ended up sitting unplayed in your library?
Source: Eurogamer
they should have a refund policy, but are scared because people will buy the game, play it, finish it and then request the refund. :))
They should introduce it under the terms that the game has less than X amount of minutes/ hours played or major fault can be proven and is accepted by developers as a developer fault and not a consumer fault (I.E. bad install or poor spec)
That’s the thing though, as Rikki says above, Steam are quite capable of tracking the hours played of a single game. Yes, it would be possible to trick Steam into thinking you hadn’t played it, but let’s face it – it’s much easier to pirate a game than hack Steam. They could very easily implement a policy whereby if you’d played the game less than an hour then you’d be eligible for a refund; or even one where devs had to give a stat for typical game length and if you’d played the game less than 1/4 or 1/8 of it, they could refund you. It really would be easy for them, and it’s about time they started returning some of our consumer rights. Valve is also breaking consumer rights laws in the UK, but it hasn’t been called up on it.
You don’t need to hack steam to hide your hours, just set it to offline mode and it wont track em.
Lol, I’m aware. An easy patch would cover that if they wanted to (which they clearly don’t).
That’s an interesting thought almost every piece of software I buy has a label on the disk saying that I can’t return it once I have opened the packaging the disk sleeve is in. I have multiple disk lying around here with it written on it from some of the biggest software providers.
I suppose the key word is if the product has “major fault”. Most Australian companies will accept returns for a much greater range of reasons though they are signed up to the Australian Retailers Association regulartions which are not legality binding but usually followed.