But do you pay an upfront amount to get games on steam? It's not a subscription then, how do they justify preventing you from using them?

> how do they justify preventing you from using them?

they don't need to justify anything. Their platforms, their rules. You signed your rights away when you clicked yes to the EULER.

Of course, you can litegate, but then you'd end up costing more money than you can gain, and probably no one will find it worth the hassle.

They may have an arbitration clause, in which you agree to not litigate. 4D chess.

That would not hold up in court. At least not in European court. Consumer law trumps EULAS and its illegal to put arbitration terms in consumer contracts.

Take a look at what's happening with AT&T, arbitration in the USA. Consumers have lost a lot of their "rights"

EU is generally a lot more consumer-friendly than US. Or company-unfriendly depending on your perspective.

Yeah, you purchase the game before playing it generally. The justification is that you've only purchased a license to play it, which they'll revoke. Still some BS to get locked out if you pay upfront for a game. It's also way worse when you realize how garbage their customer service is. It's pretty hard to get a human on the other side within a week or two, so it's way harder to get wrong things fixed.

Why would anyone use steam then?

Because it's tremendously convenient, the games are cheap, and there's a two-week, two-hours-played window for refunds.

"But I can't chargeback if I get irrationally gamer-ragey" is not something I've ever worried about, ever.

Credit card charge backs are a federal law created to protect consumer rights.

Steam's ToS are at odds with federal law in this respect as they say I have a 2 week / 1 hour window to get a refund.

Federal law says I have 60 days and then outlines under what conditions, but they are pretty broad.

Previously I purchased a software license for Gamemaker Studio Master Collection (directly from YoYo, not through Steam thankfully).

This was when Windows 10 was very new, but YoYo claimed it was supported. Turned out it had bugs with some configurations and so it was crashing on launch; completely unusable.

I opened a support ticket and was following up, but they had no idea how long it would take to fix it.

Next thing that happens is they drop the price from about $800 to about $400.

There I was, still unable to use the software and now it was 1/2 the price. So I contacted them again and said, "Look, it's been a month now and you still haven't fixed this and you dropped the price to 1/2 what I paid. I've been really patient, the least you can do is refund me the difference since I still can't even use the software."

They came back and said, "No it was $800 when you bought it you just have to wait until we get it fixed."

At that point I was super frustrated and replied back and said, "I'm done, just refund the entire amount and cancel my license."

YoYo's reply was that they don't give refunds under any circumstances and that it was plainly spelled out in the EULA.

So I called my credit card company and they did a charge back.

Circling back, now they sell through Steam and if this had happened Steam would ban my account and block me from ALL software I had ever purchased from them.

It's unethical and bordering on illegal that Steam takes retaliatory measures against consumers for excercising their consumer credit rights as provided by federal law.

Quite frankly Steam should be on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.

Not charged back. But steam having a kill switch where they can prevent you from playing any game if for any reason they don't like you. I'm not sure I would pay any money upfront for what is really a subscription.

I don't think it's something that you need to worry about unless you're gonna be overtly shitty. I have my beefs with Valve, but not on this topic. Even if you get caught hacking in a multiplayer game, your account isn't banned (though you may be VAC banned from playing multiplayer in games that participate in VAC). Steam-wide bans only come from chargebacks that are against your EULA--and their refund policy is pretty reasonable, I think--and similar stuff pulled against Steam itself rather than anything you'll do during the course of using the service normally.

And if you're really paranoid about it, you can pretty easily back up games and play them with a cracked Steam DLL. It's not a big deal.

Some games give you no choice.