Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: MP-Ryan on December 23, 2016, 01:17:11 pm
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So the annual Steam Winter Sale is on, and I noticed everyone needs to pay close attention to the pricing; the discounts are not as high as normal, and the base prices for some titles are higher. Withcer 3 GOTY is currently $41.99 CAD on Steam; GOG.com has it for $30.99 CAD.
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the base prices for some titles are higher.
They did that with the Summer Sale, too. I don't remember which game i was watching, but it jumped from $20 to $25 and then was on sale for $16.67 so they could say it was 33% off.
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Somebody should inform Gaben's legal team that there are several major class-action lawsuits against retailers doing this sort of thing going on right now.
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Whoa, didn't mean to imply Steam raised prices before the sale, just that some of Steam's non-sale prices are now somewhat higher than their competition.
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Whoa, didn't mean to imply Steam raised prices before the sale, just that some of Steam's non-sale prices are now somewhat higher than their competition.
lol that is EXACTLY what I meant. Then after the sale the regular price dropped back to normal, so AFAIK they never actually charged the higher price.
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Somebody should inform Gaben's legal team that there are several major class-action lawsuits against retailers doing this sort of thing going on right now.
Seems to me, in the US at least, Steam's SSA prohibits customers from engaging in class action lawsuits (or using the court system at all). Sure would be a shame if the presence of such a waiver in the SSA emboldened Valve and their clients to begin engaging in some anti-consumer bull**** on the Steam storefront.
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Has that practice been tested yet? EA was the first one I remember hearing about doing that, and since then almost every EULA in existence has added an arbitration clause. I've seen many people claim it's unenforceable, but there's not exactly a great track record for consumer rights holding up in court against corporate lawyers.
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Has that practice been tested yet?
I am not aware of any test cases that have occurred in the specific context of software EULAs. That said, the practice of including mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers in software licenses picked up around the same time as a couple of federal cases that strengthened such clauses. The cases in question specified that a challenge to the legality of a contract with a mandatory arbitration clause must be first heard by an arbitrator, before it can be heard by a court.
EA was the first one I remember hearing about doing that, and since then almost every EULA in existence has added an arbitration clause.
Two points on this:
First, the trivial: I think that, in the realm of video games, Bethesda either beat everyone to the punch or was a very early adopter. Fallout 3's EULA (the disc version--this wasn't snuck in later) has a mandatory arbitration clause, and that came out way before I started watching out for that particular brand of shennanigan. The disc version of Dragon Age - Origins, an EA title released a year later, did not have such a clause. EA is definately on that train now, which was why I've given subsequent DA titles a miss, but they weren't the first.
The more substantial point, though, is that not all EULAs do carry mandatory arbitration clauses or class action waivers. They're mostly limited to big publishers and particularly those based in the United States. In 2012-ish, I stopped buying games and using platforms that required a class action waiver and/or mandatory arbitration agreement. I even stopped buying games for which I couldn't view the EULA ahead of purchase. My library on GoG is substantial and continues to grow, limited more by my own cashflow than prevalence of bad licenses. There's enough pro-consumer publishers (or at least publishers based in international jurisdictions that don't put up with this level of anti-consumer bull****) that you can avoid odious license agreements without having to give up gaming as a hobby.