6 ms·

Came here to say this too. This just needs to be the rule generally. Steam and Amazon do the same thing - get hacked and get charged for some items, if you di

by paulmd 4y ago

Came here to say this too. This just needs to be the rule generally. Steam and Amazon do the same thing - get hacked and get charged for some items, if you dispute the Steam charge you lose your $5000 account, that's not a fair playing field and effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks. Hopefully steam resolves it, that's always the first line of defense, but if they don't, you still can't charge me for it. It should really be a blanket rule against revoking access to previously purchased items in any form. If I get hacked and the perp buys something on my amazon account, I shouldn't lose access to music I've purchased etc. And as someone else notes - this also is a problem with Google revoking your account (or losing access to it) and then losing access to other services that auth against Google single-sign-on.

hunter2_ 4y ago
> music I've purchased They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination." If they simply used a word better suited to the reality of the situation, then it wouldn't be a surprise that the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for. Maybe something like "micro-upgrade [my account]." Obviously eliminating that dependency is even better, but baby steps.
- sirmarksalot 4y ago
  The bigger issue is that because of the market power of these digital storefronts, it doesn't matter what your mental model of the transaction is, you don't have a choice in the matter. Yes, online stores with better terms exist, but they don't tend to have the games that you'd want to buy. I always get a warm feeling when a game I'm interested in has an itch.io link, but I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking it'll ever replace Steam, even if Steam had to stop calling itself a store. Steam is just far too established, and the network effect is just way too strong.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    I think a lot of platforms would change the terms of their digital products if they could not use the term "Buy" otherwise.
- yatac42 4y ago
  > > music I've purchased > They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination." That doesn't really apply to buying music though, does it? If Amazon banned my account, that wouldn't prevent me from listening to the MP3s I've bought from them. It would only prevent me from re-downloading them from their servers if I somehow lost all of my local copies. But if I buy a CD from a physical store, they also don't give a me another copy for free if I lose it (even without account termination entering into it), so I'm not really any worse off with the digital download.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    > But if I buy a CD from a physical store ... This is literally the nature of physical vs digital goods. We can, and should, do better for customers than the current systems from Steam and Amazon (among others) allow.
    - yatac42 4y ago
      Which current systems? For games on Steam and movies basically anywhere, the current system is that after I buy the game/movie, I can watch/play it for as long as I have access to the account. If I lose the account or the service shuts down, I'm fucked. That sucks. For games on GOG or MP3s basically anywhere, the current system is that I buy it and then I can play the game/music forever as long as I don't lose the downloaded files. If I do lose the files, I can still redownload them as long as the service is still operating and I still have access to the account. The second system seems fine to me.
      - justinclift 4y ago
        Good point, I've specifically mentioned Steam and Amazon.
        yatac42 4y ago
        Yes and buying music on Amazon (which is what the comment I originally responded to was about), you get system number 2, i.e. a DRM-free MP3 download. Buying movies on Amazon is a different matter entirely, but the comment and my reply were specifically about music.
- mahathu 4y ago
  Didn't they use to let users download mp3s when they bought an album? Did that change?
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    Ah, you're behind the times. You may be remembering 2008 when Amazon had those big "DRM Free" messages and t-shirts and talked a lot about how music wanted to be free. It was a big part of their sales pitch. That faded away, and then some music started using DRM. However, if you purchase a music song or album, you can still mostly download MP3s, as far as I know. On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM.
    - hug 4y ago
      > On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM. This seems entirely reasonable: No one thinks that by subscribing to Unlimited that they're actually purchasing a copy of every single song forever. It's very much known that it's a subscription.
  - lmm 4y ago
    That's still there although they emphasise it less and less (they want you on the monthly "unlimited" subscription instead). But only for music; their video offering is locked streams only, for example.
  - queer_will 4y ago
    Does anybody know how to do this? I'm trying to download some albums I bought back in 2010, but I can't see anywhere to download the MP3s. It will only let me play it through the web player.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for The moment you made the account a pre-requisite to use something I have already paid for - whether it's software, music, or an internet connected lightbult, is the moment the account stopped being a privilidge. Do you see where it is headed next? We have internet connected cars and door locks. There are subscribtions for a butt-heater in a car. Withing the next 5 years someone will freeze to death because a company has pulled or made a mess of their account. There is no other line of business where you can unilaterally revoke a service that the customer has already paid for. Where continous service requires some conditions or behaviour, this is spelled out in a contract - these companies change their terms on a whim.
vuln 4y ago
You purchased _access_ to the media for as long as the company decides to host it. You don't physically own the media. Think of it as renting or a lease.
- paulmd 4y ago
  That may be true, but the EU can simply outlaw those types of contractual arrangements going forward, and require that prior purchases be either defaulted into the new purchase arrangement or refunded. Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens. It doesn't have to be the way it is in the US with corporations holding all the cards, that's just regulatory capture in action. That's how the EU works in general, the balance is shifted way towards consumer protections - even if companies don't like it, tough. You get a default 2 year warranty on everything, no questions asked, and if the items fails past that due to an inherent defect in design or manufacture, they have to replace it even if it's outside the warranty window. And that's just normal, that's how everything is expected to run. USB cables, charges, all that crap, the EU does what it thinks is best for its citizens' lives, and while specific things sometimes do go wrong, on net it's a massive benefit to everyone's quality of life. Companies exist to serve us, folks, not the other way around. It doesn't have to be this way. "Oh we put something in the terms of service"? Yeah bullshit. Mandatory binding arbitration in your contract of adhesion? Arbitrate on deez nuts. The US is completely obscene by the standards of the rest of the developed world.
  - vuln 4y ago
    It would be interesting to see the EU try and force a company to host something in perpetuity. Interesting thought exercise.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      They could just actually sell things instead. As in, sell for real, not some at-our-discretion lease. Nobody's forcing companies to gate access and add DRM and all that. Such a change probably wouldn't result in perpetual hosting, but in actually selling things. Or, in only providing rentals. Either way, the situation would be clearer to the end user.
spacemadness 4y ago
I could see these being difficult logistical problems for companies but that gives them no right to socialize the problem by playing hardball and holding accounts hostage. That problem is in their domain to solve, and sorry that being a profitable business is tough but, again, solving this is not on the customer.
- drstewart 4y ago
  How is it "socializing the problem" other than being a buzzword phrase that's been thrown around lately in other contexts that feels like it fits?
  - devmor 4y ago
    Yeah that phrase doesn't really apply here. They're not pushing the solution onto any portion of the population - they're just straight up blackballing users.
- dnissley 4y ago
  I imagine the solution will simply be to charge higher prices across the board. We will all pay for the ability to charge back and not lose account access, including subsidizing the most flagrant abusers of such a policy. This could be a good trade off, but I think it's important to highlight that there is definitely no free lunch here and that legislating this problem away will have some downstream effects.
  - akhosravian 4y ago
    What’s the actual cost for chargebacks here? Presumably they are quite capable of revoking licenses to the purchased item. This is slightly hairier for in app purchases laundered through a game currency run by a third party, but still seems doable. Is there a reason the cost isn’t asymptotically close to 0 here? In the worst case they stop allowing an account to make new purchases while keeping what they’ve bought. Is that an objectionable outcome?
    - 4y ago
Thaxll 4y ago
Most use case are not hacks aren't they? If you charge back because not happy for example? Every time you charge back Steam or Epic has to pay $10 or so to the bank if I recall.
- flangola7 4y ago
  There are other reasons to use a chargeback than just fraud.
  - Thaxll 4y ago
    Which is?
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      Other examples would be the goods or services paid for never being actually delivered or being significantly differently that what was promised.
    - cwkoss 4y ago
      - Deceptive advertising - Removal of advertised features - Broken UX / Failure to deliver purchase successfully (I think that last one is going to be increasingly common as people spin up a bunch of thin-clients over GPT-4 and other AI tools - I've already tried buying an AI art thing and it was just completely broken and had to do a refund through googlepay).
- devmor 4y ago
  There are many acceptable (to the financial institution) reasons to perform a chargeback. Treating them all in the same manner is a business problem on the merchant's end.
indymike 4y ago
> effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks This behavior for smaller companies will likely result in fines from Visa, MasterCard and other cards. You really are supposed to treat charge-backs like you would losing an arbitration if you are a merchant. I've watched many a merchant do shady things around charge-backs and find out the hard way (I used to own an MSP, was enlightening). Most of the time it was trying to sue someone after losing, and then getting their case tossed because the judge treated the suit like they were reviewing an arbitration... and most of the time the merchants were actually in the wrong (as in selling defective goods, not delivering services or over-charging).
- paulmd 4y ago
  I agree, the protections is meaningful for small/medium vendors of physical goods. The problem is the balance of power shifts when you have oligopolistic "platform" vendors where the stake of the user is not just that one transaction but the sum of all previous transactions, and that is something that is really only possible in digital transactions. Wal-Mart cannot come into my house and take back the lamps off my table and the food off my shelves. Effectively, Steam and Amazon and Apple can do that - because, as others note, it's not a purchase, it's a revocable license and the ToS includes a "whenever we want" clause. Requiring that all licenses be refunded at the face value in the event of cancellation would be one relatively equitable outcome. Or you can simply prohibit revocation - refuse to allow companies to ever invoke those terms except after a legal proceeding or similar oddball circumstances. There is a similar effect around provision of services really. Once you reach the oligopolistic level of market consolidation (and there are services like Steam or Google where that's practically inevitable) then different rules really ought to apply. Which is a problem in a lot of areas, not just revocable licenses.
raph43l 4y ago
[dead]
optionalsquid 4y ago
> Steam and Amazon do the same thing - get hacked and get charged for some items, if you dispute the Steam charge you lose your $5000 account, that's not a fair playing field and effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks. As far as I know, you won't actually lose your account if you perform a chargeback against Steam, but the account does get restricted in a number of ways, preventing further purchases, access to community features (including trading), multiplayer on VAT enabled serves, and more. The official documentation does not list the specific restrictions [0], but the (fairly old) screenshot in this thread does [1]. Moreover, the restrictions seem to temporary in some cases, even without the account holder reverting the charge-back [2]. Both sources are old, but I don't recall hearing of any changes in this regard, nor could I find anything in that vein. [0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22D2 https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_restricted_due_to_chargebacks_but_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_charged_back_a_recent_transaction_help/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_char...
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I think ultimately the only way to solve this is to legislate some notion of digital "ownership." Steam SOLD me a game. Amazon SOLD me an e-book. Shut down my account or refuse to do further business with me as you like, that's your right, but if you SOLD me something, you can't have it back. You need to either make it available to me or return my money. If Amazon wants to put the word "buy" on a button, then something needs to be sold. Otherwise the button needs to read "acquire revokable license" or something. And, of course, this leads to the reason it'll never happen: first sale doctrine. If I own something, I need to be able to transfer it to someone else.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Isn't a big blocker in this space the fact that when you can hide behind a digital license to use a copy of the game the potential that you may, at some point in the future, be unable to deliver a copy of that game to the consumer isn't a big issue? I had thought that electronic goods dealers (e-books, steam, whatever) had some issues with actually selling goods because of the fact that a sold good needs to continue to be accessible even if their platform becomes too expensive to operate at some point. I wonder if we could shift the definition of sale to something more reasonable access-wise in the long term and come up with a reasonable path for resale since, with a third party host like steam, infinite transferability isn't really feasible - there are technicalities around account registration and the like that would need to place some limits on your right to resell the item.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    While not realistic to get the world to move to this there is a simple test - if you're still selling it and/or still protecting it with DRM then you have capability to distribute. If the answer to both is no then accessing the content where you originally bought it isn't a big issue anymore. What's a reasonable amount of access (e.g. "can I just redownload the game 24/7 for 8 years") would need to be defined but that's a much easier problem. With the current model you run into an inherent conflict between protecting content you aren't truly relying on the monetization of anymore and what's fair to users because it requires putting the publisher/publisher's agent in front of the access.
cwkoss 4y ago
Alternately (or additionally), I'd love for regulatory prohibition of implied ownership of these sorts of items. Ex. if access is revokable, it's illegal to use the word "Buy" alone - have to use "Rent" or "License" or "Buy License" or something that doesn't imply ownership (because ownership is not being offered)
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  I don't feel like this is a meaningful change. If steam changed all the "Buy" to "Rent" on it's website, nothing would actually change.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Customers would be informed. Many would leave for GOG.com
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      I do not think customer behaviour would change that much.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Then Amazon has no reason to resist this change!
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Words are powerful. See how hard they fight the legislation.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    I think it would change, but Rent is also not the right word. I'm familiar with Rent and I intuit what it means. I have access to an asset for a limited time, and then I can choose to continue renting it, or not. The decision is in my hands. License might be a better word. Because what they're selling is a "one time payment for use of this asset for an undetermined amount of time" - that's not "buy" but it's also not "rent". When my license ends it's likely I can't get another. Certainly its not my decision to make. The period of the license us unknown - till you block my account, till you go under, till you decide this service is no longer available, till _your_ license-to-license expires, and so on. So yeah, I don't think it's Rent.

by paulmd 4y ago

hunter2_ 4y ago

> music I've purchased They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination." If they simply used a word better suited to the reality of the situation, then it wouldn't be a surprise that the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for. Maybe something like "micro-upgrade [my account]." Obviously eliminating that dependency is even better, but baby steps.

sirmarksalot 4y ago
The bigger issue is that because of the market power of these digital storefronts, it doesn't matter what your mental model of the transaction is, you don't have a choice in the matter. Yes, online stores with better terms exist, but they don't tend to have the games that you'd want to buy. I always get a warm feeling when a game I'm interested in has an itch.io link, but I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking it'll ever replace Steam, even if Steam had to stop calling itself a store. Steam is just far too established, and the network effect is just way too strong.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I think a lot of platforms would change the terms of their digital products if they could not use the term "Buy" otherwise.
yatac42 4y ago
> > music I've purchased > They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination." That doesn't really apply to buying music though, does it? If Amazon banned my account, that wouldn't prevent me from listening to the MP3s I've bought from them. It would only prevent me from re-downloading them from their servers if I somehow lost all of my local copies. But if I buy a CD from a physical store, they also don't give a me another copy for free if I lose it (even without account termination entering into it), so I'm not really any worse off with the digital download.
- justinclift 4y ago
  > But if I buy a CD from a physical store ... This is literally the nature of physical vs digital goods. We can, and should, do better for customers than the current systems from Steam and Amazon (among others) allow.
  - yatac42 4y ago
    Which current systems? For games on Steam and movies basically anywhere, the current system is that after I buy the game/movie, I can watch/play it for as long as I have access to the account. If I lose the account or the service shuts down, I'm fucked. That sucks. For games on GOG or MP3s basically anywhere, the current system is that I buy it and then I can play the game/music forever as long as I don't lose the downloaded files. If I do lose the files, I can still redownload them as long as the service is still operating and I still have access to the account. The second system seems fine to me.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      Good point, I've specifically mentioned Steam and Amazon.
      - yatac42 4y ago
        Yes and buying music on Amazon (which is what the comment I originally responded to was about), you get system number 2, i.e. a DRM-free MP3 download. Buying movies on Amazon is a different matter entirely, but the comment and my reply were specifically about music.
mahathu 4y ago
Didn't they use to let users download mp3s when they bought an album? Did that change?
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Ah, you're behind the times. You may be remembering 2008 when Amazon had those big "DRM Free" messages and t-shirts and talked a lot about how music wanted to be free. It was a big part of their sales pitch. That faded away, and then some music started using DRM. However, if you purchase a music song or album, you can still mostly download MP3s, as far as I know. On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM.
  - hug 4y ago
    > On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM. This seems entirely reasonable: No one thinks that by subscribing to Unlimited that they're actually purchasing a copy of every single song forever. It's very much known that it's a subscription.
- lmm 4y ago
  That's still there although they emphasise it less and less (they want you on the monthly "unlimited" subscription instead). But only for music; their video offering is locked streams only, for example.
- queer_will 4y ago
  Does anybody know how to do this? I'm trying to download some albums I bought back in 2010, but I can't see anywhere to download the MP3s. It will only let me play it through the web player.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for The moment you made the account a pre-requisite to use something I have already paid for - whether it's software, music, or an internet connected lightbult, is the moment the account stopped being a privilidge. Do you see where it is headed next? We have internet connected cars and door locks. There are subscribtions for a butt-heater in a car. Withing the next 5 years someone will freeze to death because a company has pulled or made a mess of their account. There is no other line of business where you can unilaterally revoke a service that the customer has already paid for. Where continous service requires some conditions or behaviour, this is spelled out in a contract - these companies change their terms on a whim.

vuln 4y ago

You purchased _access_ to the media for as long as the company decides to host it. You don't physically own the media. Think of it as renting or a lease.

paulmd 4y ago
That may be true, but the EU can simply outlaw those types of contractual arrangements going forward, and require that prior purchases be either defaulted into the new purchase arrangement or refunded. Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens. It doesn't have to be the way it is in the US with corporations holding all the cards, that's just regulatory capture in action. That's how the EU works in general, the balance is shifted way towards consumer protections - even if companies don't like it, tough. You get a default 2 year warranty on everything, no questions asked, and if the items fails past that due to an inherent defect in design or manufacture, they have to replace it even if it's outside the warranty window. And that's just normal, that's how everything is expected to run. USB cables, charges, all that crap, the EU does what it thinks is best for its citizens' lives, and while specific things sometimes do go wrong, on net it's a massive benefit to everyone's quality of life. Companies exist to serve us, folks, not the other way around. It doesn't have to be this way. "Oh we put something in the terms of service"? Yeah bullshit. Mandatory binding arbitration in your contract of adhesion? Arbitrate on deez nuts. The US is completely obscene by the standards of the rest of the developed world.
- vuln 4y ago
  It would be interesting to see the EU try and force a company to host something in perpetuity. Interesting thought exercise.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    They could just actually sell things instead. As in, sell for real, not some at-our-discretion lease. Nobody's forcing companies to gate access and add DRM and all that. Such a change probably wouldn't result in perpetual hosting, but in actually selling things. Or, in only providing rentals. Either way, the situation would be clearer to the end user.

spacemadness 4y ago

I could see these being difficult logistical problems for companies but that gives them no right to socialize the problem by playing hardball and holding accounts hostage. That problem is in their domain to solve, and sorry that being a profitable business is tough but, again, solving this is not on the customer.

drstewart 4y ago
How is it "socializing the problem" other than being a buzzword phrase that's been thrown around lately in other contexts that feels like it fits?
- devmor 4y ago
  Yeah that phrase doesn't really apply here. They're not pushing the solution onto any portion of the population - they're just straight up blackballing users.
dnissley 4y ago
I imagine the solution will simply be to charge higher prices across the board. We will all pay for the ability to charge back and not lose account access, including subsidizing the most flagrant abusers of such a policy. This could be a good trade off, but I think it's important to highlight that there is definitely no free lunch here and that legislating this problem away will have some downstream effects.
- akhosravian 4y ago
  What’s the actual cost for chargebacks here? Presumably they are quite capable of revoking licenses to the purchased item. This is slightly hairier for in app purchases laundered through a game currency run by a third party, but still seems doable. Is there a reason the cost isn’t asymptotically close to 0 here? In the worst case they stop allowing an account to make new purchases while keeping what they’ve bought. Is that an objectionable outcome?
  - 4y ago

Thaxll 4y ago

Most use case are not hacks aren't they? If you charge back because not happy for example? Every time you charge back Steam or Epic has to pay $10 or so to the bank if I recall.

flangola7 4y ago
There are other reasons to use a chargeback than just fraud.
- Thaxll 4y ago
  Which is?
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    Other examples would be the goods or services paid for never being actually delivered or being significantly differently that what was promised.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    - Deceptive advertising - Removal of advertised features - Broken UX / Failure to deliver purchase successfully (I think that last one is going to be increasingly common as people spin up a bunch of thin-clients over GPT-4 and other AI tools - I've already tried buying an AI art thing and it was just completely broken and had to do a refund through googlepay).
devmor 4y ago
There are many acceptable (to the financial institution) reasons to perform a chargeback. Treating them all in the same manner is a business problem on the merchant's end.

indymike 4y ago

> effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks This behavior for smaller companies will likely result in fines from Visa, MasterCard and other cards. You really are supposed to treat charge-backs like you would losing an arbitration if you are a merchant. I've watched many a merchant do shady things around charge-backs and find out the hard way (I used to own an MSP, was enlightening). Most of the time it was trying to sue someone after losing, and then getting their case tossed because the judge treated the suit like they were reviewing an arbitration... and most of the time the merchants were actually in the wrong (as in selling defective goods, not delivering services or over-charging).

paulmd 4y ago
I agree, the protections is meaningful for small/medium vendors of physical goods. The problem is the balance of power shifts when you have oligopolistic "platform" vendors where the stake of the user is not just that one transaction but the sum of all previous transactions, and that is something that is really only possible in digital transactions. Wal-Mart cannot come into my house and take back the lamps off my table and the food off my shelves. Effectively, Steam and Amazon and Apple can do that - because, as others note, it's not a purchase, it's a revocable license and the ToS includes a "whenever we want" clause. Requiring that all licenses be refunded at the face value in the event of cancellation would be one relatively equitable outcome. Or you can simply prohibit revocation - refuse to allow companies to ever invoke those terms except after a legal proceeding or similar oddball circumstances. There is a similar effect around provision of services really. Once you reach the oligopolistic level of market consolidation (and there are services like Steam or Google where that's practically inevitable) then different rules really ought to apply. Which is a problem in a lot of areas, not just revocable licenses.

raph43l 4y ago

[dead]

optionalsquid 4y ago

> Steam and Amazon do the same thing - get hacked and get charged for some items, if you dispute the Steam charge you lose your $5000 account, that's not a fair playing field and effectively negates the protection offered by credit card networks. As far as I know, you won't actually lose your account if you perform a chargeback against Steam, but the account does get restricted in a number of ways, preventing further purchases, access to community features (including trading), multiplayer on VAT enabled serves, and more. The official documentation does not list the specific restrictions [0], but the (fairly old) screenshot in this thread does [1]. Moreover, the restrictions seem to temporary in some cases, even without the account holder reverting the charge-back [2]. Both sources are old, but I don't recall hearing of any changes in this regard, nor could I find anything in that vein. [0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22D2 https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_restricted_due_to_chargebacks_but_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_charged_back_a_recent_transaction_help/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_char...

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

I think ultimately the only way to solve this is to legislate some notion of digital "ownership." Steam SOLD me a game. Amazon SOLD me an e-book. Shut down my account or refuse to do further business with me as you like, that's your right, but if you SOLD me something, you can't have it back. You need to either make it available to me or return my money. If Amazon wants to put the word "buy" on a button, then something needs to be sold. Otherwise the button needs to read "acquire revokable license" or something. And, of course, this leads to the reason it'll never happen: first sale doctrine. If I own something, I need to be able to transfer it to someone else.

munk-a 4y ago
Isn't a big blocker in this space the fact that when you can hide behind a digital license to use a copy of the game the potential that you may, at some point in the future, be unable to deliver a copy of that game to the consumer isn't a big issue? I had thought that electronic goods dealers (e-books, steam, whatever) had some issues with actually selling goods because of the fact that a sold good needs to continue to be accessible even if their platform becomes too expensive to operate at some point. I wonder if we could shift the definition of sale to something more reasonable access-wise in the long term and come up with a reasonable path for resale since, with a third party host like steam, infinite transferability isn't really feasible - there are technicalities around account registration and the like that would need to place some limits on your right to resell the item.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  While not realistic to get the world to move to this there is a simple test - if you're still selling it and/or still protecting it with DRM then you have capability to distribute. If the answer to both is no then accessing the content where you originally bought it isn't a big issue anymore. What's a reasonable amount of access (e.g. "can I just redownload the game 24/7 for 8 years") would need to be defined but that's a much easier problem. With the current model you run into an inherent conflict between protecting content you aren't truly relying on the monetization of anymore and what's fair to users because it requires putting the publisher/publisher's agent in front of the access.

cwkoss 4y ago

Alternately (or additionally), I'd love for regulatory prohibition of implied ownership of these sorts of items. Ex. if access is revokable, it's illegal to use the word "Buy" alone - have to use "Rent" or "License" or "Buy License" or something that doesn't imply ownership (because ownership is not being offered)

madeofpalk 4y ago
I don't feel like this is a meaningful change. If steam changed all the "Buy" to "Rent" on it's website, nothing would actually change.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Customers would be informed. Many would leave for GOG.com
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    I do not think customer behaviour would change that much.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Then Amazon has no reason to resist this change!
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Words are powerful. See how hard they fight the legislation.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I think it would change, but Rent is also not the right word. I'm familiar with Rent and I intuit what it means. I have access to an asset for a limited time, and then I can choose to continue renting it, or not. The decision is in my hands. License might be a better word. Because what they're selling is a "one time payment for use of this asset for an undetermined amount of time" - that's not "buy" but it's also not "rent". When my license ends it's likely I can't get another. Certainly its not my decision to make. The period of the license us unknown - till you block my account, till you go under, till you decide this service is no longer available, till _your_ license-to-license expires, and so on. So yeah, I don't think it's Rent.