Gaming giant Valve Software, developers and operators of the insanely popular Steam digital distribution service, was slammed in federal court yesterday in a case levelled by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, who argued that Valve breached Australian consumer law when it told customers that they were not entitled to digital refunds.
Steam has a pretty massive audience: 2.2 million Australians use the service, and they’ve previously been told by the company at various points that they are not entitled to refunds for digitally downloaded content.
The maximum penalty for deceptive or misleading conduct is $1.1 million for each breach.
Basically, this is the first time software (like video games) has been described as ‘goods’ in relation to consumer law – so it could have massive implications for other app and software distributors who aren’t keen on giving refunds (we’re looking at you, Apple).
Now it looks like, as ‘goods’, software and other digital products need to come with “statutory guarantees about goods being of acceptable quality”. Depending on how this goes down, this could be a pretty big deal for gamers and general consumers in Australia.
Source: Fairfax.
Image: Steam.
