I'm not too aware of how Australian jurisdiction works and whatnot but what determines when Valve has to comply with Australian law? Even if Valve did not comply with the Australian law, Valve is an American company so what determines when they have to comply?
Yes. I am serious.
Until recently they did not sell anything physically. They are not at fault in Australia for not knowing the laws of a country they do not have a single bit of property in. They don't even export anything to Australia.
Topic cleaned!
Keep the discussion at a proper and mature level.
No offends needed.
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The Australian law says something along the lines of if you do business in Australia you need to abide by the laws. The Refund policy is only for broken and non functional items.
According to the valve employee handbook, a lot of their employees came from Australia and New Zealand. I'm not sure how much of that is a fact but if it is i don't think they'll just pull out of Australia altogether. Also they have already implemented a refunds system on steam so i don't see what would be so hard about localizing to Australia. I think that they have needed to implement Australian currency for a long time.
Necro'd for a bit of an update.
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Next up, Valve sues Australia for $6M because Aussie law violates their ToS
Gday
First Post on the forums ...
Happy Christmas and Merry new year everyone
I was a bit slow and ANTI DRM to make the push from DISC
to Steam but evently made it over the years
The problems I found with Steam in AU has been:-
* Main stream multi plat games sold for more then disc in AU retailers
* Mainsteam multiplat games often sold for USD$10-USD$30 (avg of USD$20 thou) more then USA steam
* Currently in 2016 and now in 2017 an USD$60 game on USA steam will be USD$80 which ends up AUD$105-AUD$110 depending on the USD <> AU rate
* We now have games on digital methods , great idea , but games NOW in mutli plat scene and even some smaller budget games have HIGHER cost due to loads of features and functions stripped out and CRAP like multiple layers of DRM (eg Steam + uplay + login accounts + Denevo) , nvidia paid off "gameworks" titles resulting in BAD optimisation of DriectX11 titles on anything but GTX cards , we have stuff like MISSING FOV , games locked at 30-60 FPS (eg NFS Rivals capped at 30), bad ports from CONSOLE to PC (Division/R6 Siege/GTA/the list goes on)
* no real PC regulation in quality standards seem to be set in place to deliver a fully fuctional PC product by so many games
* Some games on steam have 100-2000 bucks USD in DLC content
Along with that , steam offers NO DIRECT easy way of getting REAL customer support
No phone number
No email
No live HTTP support
I know of 3 people in my gaming clan that have lost their steam accounts due to bad password management and going thou several emails and now cant play games
Also VALVE and STEAM REFUSES to sell :-
Steam controller via AU steam store after 13-14 months
Steam Link via AU steam store after 13-14 months
Steam machines after 1-2 years
It seems SteamOS fell flat on devliering a console style experince
I HATE consoles after 2001-2003 (basically xbox orginal/ps2 onwards)
but I think it would be good to get console people migrating OVER to PC
if steam OS delivered a slightly better experince and console style gui
It also seems from all my research that you get better FPS by just
installing steam on a normal distro
AND
its really bloody annoying that they dont make the steam link opensource/Gpl
i would love to make an DIY ARM system just like the steamlink
I would of refunded a lot of games on steam in the past if thier refund system was better and
actually AVAILABLE years before it was FINALLY added to AU steam
I think for me now in 2017 I am holding back buying EARLY ACCESS
and crowd funded stuff , I got bitten with Bugbears Wreakfest and Star Citizen
both are now over 3 years in "early access alpha" and no more looking like Ill
play either for another 3-4 years
It would be good if STEAM and VALVE setup a programmers guideline cerfication program
that to be Steam logo approved you have to design a game correctly
eg:-
OpenGL or VULKAN not DX11/12
OpenAL or some other cross platform sound api
Game released for Linux and Windows (MacOSX optional)
Able to skip logos
NO Peer2peer Match making in ANY ranked online game larger then 4 players
All multiplayer games must use server browser
Graphic settings, such as turn off DOF/Weapon DOF/AMBOC/etc and FOV slider
and ability to choose FPS at 60/75/95/122/144/165/200 or unlocked/uncapped etc
Also AUD$3 mill will be NOTHING for USA Steam/Valve
will it finally unblock steam stuff from sale , nope
will it finally make steam sell in AUD , nope
will it finally regulate pricing so we dont almost pay DOUBLE compared to USA for digital goods , nope
will it finally have a decent contact custumer help support system , nope
In the end backing for crowd funded titles and buying your games on steam is a RISK
at the end of the day valve could close the servers and we couldn't do a thing about it
i guess that's the issue with closed source and company run servers
but they have definally done a good job on reducing pirating games, BUT in
that process we no longer have LAN enabled titles, hardly any split screen games
and its very RARE to see a PROPER true sp/mp demo BEFORE retail of a game
anymore compared to the shareware days
/rant over