Steam's "No Refund" Policy Oddly Well-Equipped

For a framework which likes to pretend that it doesn't need nor support the concept of refunds, despite being a framework which takes your money with essentially no promise of return for goods or services ... Steam seems well equipped for dealing with that alternative as I signed on for a bit of Team Fortress and got a notice telling me that The Club should be due for a refund.

Remember, peeps, when you buy from Steam (Valve) ... you get charged the moment you send your credit info ... regardless of what Steam decides to actually send you ... so if you spent $50 on an error message or completely non-functional PITA ... Valve's policy would still be to go sod off ... as they already have your money.

Steam Resolution

So first there was this and then there was that.

Now Valve has issued (or at least told the Better Business Bureau they have, honestly I haven't checked yet) a refund. Course, I had to go to the BBB just to get Valve to respond after they directed me to their terms and agreements. Which is fairly ridiculous. I've worked for various consumer-orientated businesses over the years, from a fairly seedy little viatical sales shop (google it, not my proudest hours) to a major retailer. The amount that the "customer is always right" is actually pretty amazing.

For instance, at my last job we got a call from the "special support line" that the customer support staff gives to the truly obstinate. With enough momentum this can actually get to the President's Office - and they wouldn't even have returned my phone calls as an employee. This person was very upset that we hadn't somehow coded in special logic to understand the fact that his PO Box had special dispensation to allow deliveries.

Completely irrational? Totally. Pointless? Yes, at this point the shopper had already been delivered his goods courtesy of the nice customer support rep. Annoying? Certainly.

The guy still got a personal call from a project manager. Why? Because business works best at the speed of good opinions. An good referral can make you more money than a refund in the long run. Look at Valve - because of their handling of this I'm more likely than not going to just erase Steam off the hard drive and never buy another Valve product again ... at least certainly not for the PC (remember, if you buy the disc you still have to go through Steam). How many me's does it take to offset the cost of a $50 purchase ... even if Valve themselves didn't get the money back from Sega?

Valve wants to be a software reseller. They should look into the retail business and realize what that actually means. The "screw the customer" approach might be funny on Clerks or Wonder Falls but in reality it is pretty bad for business.

Oh yeah ... and when I called Sears to cancel the dispute over the charge, they tried to keep me on the line to sell me extra features. WTF? I'm trying to do the responsible thing here and then get back to work and this guy wants to sell me rust-proofing? Why is being a consumer such a pain in the ass these days?

Update: This was the "customer support" response from Steam:

As requested, we have processed a refund to your account.

This is a one time gesture, and won't be repeated.

We are working with Sega to resolve the issues you experienced.

Your confirmation number is: 126204578075991621

Your bank or credit card issuer will return the funds to your account - please allow 3-5 business days for the funds to be posted.

Please note in the future that Steam purchases, per the Steam Subscriber Agreement, are not refundable - this refund was issued as a one-time customer service gesture.

Darn right it won't be repeated. I don't believe I'll be allowing myself to stumble into that problem again.

Valve Says "No Refund" To Broken Software

So my attempt to download The Club from Steam has ended in miserable failure and to Steam support's suggestion that it is all Sega's fault, I just responded that I wanted a refund.

I get a one line response:

As with most software products, we will not offer refunds for purchases made online as outlined in the software license - please review Section 4 of the Steam Subscriber Agreement for more information.

Sure, I can see if I was bitching about framerates or complaining that the graphics suck or something ... I can kinda see their point. If I had played the game for a few hours and didn't like it ... I can see their point. They were selling a game, not a demo, and there's a certain amount of buyer responsibility there.

But Valve didn't sell me a game. They sold me an error box. I've never so much as seen a splash screen from this software. They have no clue how to fix it and Sega's support site is likewise blank. I spent $50 for an error box and for Steam to chew up some more of my hard drive.

What's more to the point is .... Valve should know all of this. For the love of all things, this is what Steam does. It gives Valve a gateway into the games I've purchased with them. They control whether I can play it or not. They log how much I play them. There is no technical reason they can't use this software to look at my account, realize I've never been able to keep the game running for more than a couple seconds, and remove my access from it.

But they won't - and here's why and why you should never buy anything from Steam. Steam is not designed to protect the consumer. It has one purpose in life and that is to protect Valve. Valve's response to you ... even if Steam throws a wrench, breaks down and keeps you from playing the games you have paid for ... will be sod off.

If I had bought the stupid game at Best Buy and ran into the same problem (which I bet I wouldn't - I'm willing to bet this is still a Steam problem) I'd be able to return it for store credit. I could get some candy or something instead of a bag of screw you which Valve is offering.

Now, Valve is perfectly capable of giving refunds and I've pointed that out to them. If they don't grant that by the end of today, I'll just call my credit card company and deny the charge this weekend.

I still get my $50. Steam will get removed from my hard drive and I'll likely never, ever buy another Valve product for any platform ever again. I don't care if Portal 2 or Half-Life 3 is the greatest game ever made, Valve's customer support is borderline criminal.

And I'll likely add a "Don't Buy From Valve (Or Steam)" block on the blog.

To clarify: Under Steam's Subscriber Agreement you are obligated to pay for the software before you actually receive it.

However, Valve is not contractually obligated to actually deliver that software to you. They could download a completely non-functional block of code to Steam's secret vault. It could be a text file encrypted to say "Ha Ha". You still have to pay and Valve does not (and apparently will not) refund your money. It is quite honestly the least consumer friendly piece of technology written in the modern age.

Use it at your own risk.

Updates: As soon as they referred me to their refund policy, I became persona non gratis to Valve. They continued to ignore the ticket even when I asked for it to be escalated, and even when I informed them I would take it up with my credit card and the BBB.

Both of which I've now done.

To date I have no verification that Valve ever delivered the software for which I paid.

This Is Why PC Gaming Is Dying

I had Steam download The Club last night in an attempt to keep from being bored with my PC. I got a break from work, and I was working from home today, so I figured I'd take about a half hour, have some fried chicken and try it out.

It launches. First I get a popup telling me I need to write down a reg key for multiplayer mode. And by write down, it's not kidding, you can't seem to highlight and copy the text or anything. Whatever, I pull up Notepad and jot it down. I send the popup along its way.

DirectX rears its ugly head and insists on installing .... um, nothing I think. But it wanted to be sure, so, ok, whatever. It does its thing and disappears.

Screen goes dark. I put on the headphones. I make sure my fingers are clean from fried chicken goodness.

I hear that wonderful Windows alert noise. Screen stays blank. I tab out to the desktop and see two error boxes. One is Windows firewall telling me that The Club wants to do something nasty with the Internet. I tell it that's just rubbish and to go away. The other is a JIT compiler error. I'm hoping one has caused the other, so I relaunch the game. It reminds me about that reg key thing again, launches, goes black and crashes. JIT error.

Fine. I reboot. Rebooting fixes things. I reboot, launch the game.

Screen goes blank.

Crashes.

Fsck.

Steam pops up a window asking if I'd like to take a hardware survey. I tell it would not. I try to find some kind of handy left-click off "The Club" which will help. Something like "find updates" or "patch this crap" or "work, damnit" but the closest I see is a link to visit the forum. So I hit that. No word on a JIT error, just some guy complaining about the graphics. And a big link at the top reminding me about that whole "Ask A Question" thing which represents Steam support.

I click that and get sent eventually to a page which tells me there's an error because I'm already logged in. I go through the hoops to "Ask A Question", which is hard at one point because The Club isn't even listed under the games list and another because it wants things like "CD Key" and I don't know if that's the same key as before and I'm too lazy to care, so I just send it along anyway.

Steam support tries to be friendly and offers me three knowledge base articles on "cafe" to see if that helps.

It doesn't. This time I did get response from an actual Steam support person who asked if validating the local cache would help.

It doesn't.

So this is why PC gaming is dying. And yes, it is dying. It is getting smaller while game sales in general is getting larger. You can say it isn't isn't isn't but it is, is is ... and this is why:

Users are annoyed with the PC game publishers. We're tired of the copy protection crap crashing the games, the installation hassles, the endless patches, selling us beta software and lousy, half-assed technical support.

PC game publishers are annoyed with the users. They're tired of throwing money at useless solutions to solve piracy, endless hardware configurations and annoying bloggers who send them drunken rants at the early hours of the morning.

PC gaming is dying because it is quickly getting to the point where it is too annoying to be left alive.

Update: Steam support just responded with a link that can basically be summarized as "blame Sega". Need any more proof?

Steam Validating ... And validating ... and...

Oh right, that's why I don't like Steam. It downloaded the TF2 updates last night and now the validation on the file is stuck at 100%, even after exiting Steam and even after rebooting the computer.

So basically software I have bought and installed is trapped on my computer. There's no actual problem with it, no actual bug, but the software that wants to police that software has utterly freaked the hell out and I can't access it.

Quick forum searches indicate the only real solution is uninstall the local content and reinstall. Oh. Yay. I was hoping to check out the new features, now I'll have download software I already had and hope Steam decides not to be an idiot anymore.

Update - Valve has made it clear to me that they are in no way responsible for actually delivering software via Steam. Because of this, I'd recommend boycotting Valve.