Nothing like a legal drama. Today, we investigate the story behind Valve's recent change to the Steam Subscriber Agreement. The story goes far deeper than I thought.
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Steam subscriber agreement removed a clause that forces individual arbitration instead of court.
Before this you couldn't sue and this couldn't do a class action, but law firms decided to just file thousands of arbitration clauses at once which cost like $1500 each to valve no matter who wins.
Valve then decided to change the SSA (whilst trying to retroactively kill outstanding arbitration cases with another clause) to save them money.
If you're in the EU, UK, AUS, or a bunch of other countries this never applied to you and you could take valve to court in your own country.
In 19 years I have never been burned by Valve, in the same period I have lost access to software (and hardware) from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and Epic. They are a money making business and will always act in their own interest but so far it seems like their own interests includes not stomping on customers (in my experience).
Exactly this. My steam account is 20 years old and I have effectively no complaints with Steam or Valve. Are they a profit-driven corporation who will thus still make profit-driven decisions? Sure. But Valve has never specifically done wrong by me, and in fact has a number of times gone against the trend to maintain their status as a comparative good guy.
Far as I'm concerned, Valve is one of the best, most trustworthy corporations I know.
Valve is not that good if you take your time to realize few things more, Valve is not that bad if you take time to realize few things more.
For example, you can't say that Ubisoft can be that bad if you take a look at the industrial grade artistic output (allow you travel and interact with artistically astonishing worlds).
But when you check side as business entity, you can see everything is set up to please share holders and people that don't even know "what's a minecraft?".
Valve knows how, when and why they mess with their customers. Ubisoft is just clueless about their gamer-customers because they known only theirs shareholders-customers.