Also, take note how they actually tell you, clearly and concisely, what has changed. Most ToS are intentionally made difficult to read to, you know, discourage people from reading them.
Forcing you to shut up or go to court isn't great either, though.
On the big stuff where they're liable for a lot of money and you might be able to get a pro bono lawyer, sure.
On the small stuff, though, the prospect of having to pay for a lawyer and likely have your case thrown out by a judge for not bring worth the expense and effort of suing a foreign company is probably going to deter a LOT of legitimate claims.
If, for example, I want to return a game in accordance with the rules and they won't let me, I'm not gonna lawyer up and sue them from the other side of the Atlantic.
I appreciate this. That said, I was playing a game on my Steamdeck last night when this popped up over the game, while the game was running. Subsequently I died in the game. Kinda shit.
Instead of Steam forcing any disputes with them to go through an "impartial" 3rd party company they choose and pay for to oversee and rule on disputes, they are saying that disputes must go through the courts.
Basically forced arbitration has always been seen as anti-consumer and unfair because the company is paying for the arbitration and is thus considered more likely to be found in favor of. Steam is doing the opposite and as such this is seen as pro-consumer and a good thing
He could be pushed out at anytime. It's this weird situation where if a serious challenger to Steam really takes off, the 75% may demand Steam gets shittier to make more money.
But Gabe won't last forever anyways, who knows what will happen without him. Which means people do want some kind of challenger to prevent a monopoly, but that just makes the other scenario more likely
I kind of did the opposite. I assumed the change would be negligible or in the customer's benefit based on Valve's track record. I hope this never changes.
Wow. Say what you want about them, but that is some good shit right there. I've been getting emails for months from some random fucks telling me about arbitration agreements, and steam releases this. One more reason to love the company.
This is because a lot of individuals tried to start an arbitration process with valve and that got costly for Valve. So now they try to force everyone to do it in a different way.
Arbitration is always cheaper and faster than the courts, because the courts are very backed up especially since the pandemic, and there's a lot of admin cost which doesn't exist in arbitration. That is why almost every other company is trying to force arbitration. So if the goal was to save money, forcing court would have the opposite effect.
If you push everybody into a class action, it will be cheaper. Have you ever gotten more than a cent on the dollar from a class action settlement(unless you're the class representative)? Sure the seem like the settlements are a lot of money, but if you can get the class action settled with very few claimants, no one will be able to sue over that particular issue again, so it puts it behind the company. Instead of being dogged by individuals for however long.
arbitration pretty much provides zero benefit to the consumer and all benefit to the organization. a big piece is that if you sign off on an arbitration clause, then there's no such thing as class action lawsuit anymore.
some companies make you sign a handwritten letter through snail mail just to opt out, because they don't want anyone filing a lawsuit, and definitely dont' want a lot of them filing together.
this is another case of corporations saying "this option is best!!" while leaving out the "for us" part
this is why it's a big deal that steam said fuck that noise
Isn't it often in both parties to settle things out of court? For the one that'd sue it's usually more money at less cost and the company gets around possibly having a bad precedent set and the bad publicity to potentially losing in court.
This is probably aimed at people creating issues in the hopes of getting a settlement for something that has a slim (but Nonzero) chance to hold up in court.
It's a company - I think this aims at people only bringing serious claims and reducing the paperwork for them - but since it's Valve people will glorify everything they do
Forced Arbitration is when a company puts something in their terms of service that forced the user to go through a process of arbitration as opposed to going to court. It is always rigged towards the company who forces it, because they are the people paying the arbitrators.
I'm not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.
It's meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.
Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.