This could be bigger than people realize. This is very common in many tech companies like Uber/Doordash/Sony/etc. where if you do a chargeback, you often get blacklisted on their service. It would be amazing if this starts to end this practice, and you can actually have authority to get your money back from your credit card and not be penalized by the service for it when they refuse to actually help.
It should really be a blanket rule against revoking access to previously purchased items in any form. If I get hacked and the perp buys something on my amazon account, I shouldn't lose access to music I've purchased etc.
And as someone else notes - this also is a problem with Google revoking your account (or losing access to it) and then losing access to other services that auth against Google single-sign-on.
Steam SOLD me a game. Amazon SOLD me an e-book. Shut down my account or refuse to do further business with me as you like, that's your right, but if you SOLD me something, you can't have it back. You need to either make it available to me or return my money. If Amazon wants to put the word "buy" on a button, then something needs to be sold. Otherwise the button needs to read "acquire revokable license" or something.
And, of course, this leads to the reason it'll never happen: first sale doctrine. If I own something, I need to be able to transfer it to someone else.
Ex. if access is revokable, it's illegal to use the word "Buy" alone - have to use "Rent" or "License" or "Buy License" or something that doesn't imply ownership (because ownership is not being offered)
They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination." If they simply used a word better suited to the reality of the situation, then it wouldn't be a surprise that the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for. Maybe something like "micro-upgrade [my account]."
Obviously eliminating that dependency is even better, but baby steps.
This behavior for smaller companies will likely result in fines from Visa, MasterCard and other cards. You really are supposed to treat charge-backs like you would losing an arbitration if you are a merchant. I've watched many a merchant do shady things around charge-backs and find out the hard way (I used to own an MSP, was enlightening). Most of the time it was trying to sue someone after losing, and then getting their case tossed because the judge treated the suit like they were reviewing an arbitration... and most of the time the merchants were actually in the wrong (as in selling defective goods, not delivering services or over-charging).
As far as I know, you won't actually lose your account if you perform a chargeback against Steam, but the account does get restricted in a number of ways, preventing further purchases, access to community features (including trading), multiplayer on VAT enabled serves, and more. The official documentation does not list the specific restrictions [0], but the (fairly old) screenshot in this thread does [1]. Moreover, the restrictions seem to temporary in some cases, even without the account holder reverting the charge-back [2]. Both sources are old, but I don't recall hearing of any changes in this regard, nor could I find anything in that vein.
[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_char...
To be clear, I'm talking about a different case, where the customer doesn't reach out for help, and doesn't give you an opportunity to correct the problem (which most banks ask them to do first but they just lie about it). With my business, this is the case for 9 out of every 10 disputes (and I have a very low dispute rate). The other 1 time is they just mistakingly reported it as a dispute because they didn't recognize it, but after you reach out they correct it with their bank (but guess what, you still have to pay the dispute fee when that happens).
When your SAAS product costs $5 / month, and the dispute fees are $15 / dispute or more, and customers go back and file disputes on the previous X months of charges, and they never give you a chance to make it right, it becomes a problem worth banning them over.
You stop selling to them. You don’t need to ban their account to do that.
Their bank?
I doubt this would be applied to other companies unless they also found those companies used confusing UIs to get people to pay. Which is still good news nonetheless, as the main issue for me is all these dark patterns in the first place.
Similarly, no company that I chargeback against do I want to do business with anymore. A chargeback is a "burn the bridges" moment. You have tried everything reasonable, and the company is now defrauding you. Why on earth do you want to continue doing business with them?
You may have curated but you do not own your library. You purchased _access_ to said library.
Although, to be honest, if a problem has deteriorated to the point where I need to do a chargeback, I've already written off doing any further business with that company anyway.
They should be required to refund every purchase on an account that they close.
Though it would smell a bit like a giant squashing ants... anti-trust and all that. :/ So maybe government getting a handle on Dark Patterns is the best way to do things.
Yes, if they get enough people doing chargebacks. The challenge is most of these big co's seem to be in the "too big to punish" camp. This is both you need a large amount of chargebacks and perhaps they may not want to fire the companies (though this is speculative).
> At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs.
I'm with you that this is still important and valuable because many companies don't blacklist you. Furthermore I'd rather have that protection and testing a service which could be no service than no service at all.
It'd really very odd to see Americans insist that they should have the right to take a service, get the money back for it from the business i.e. get the service for free, and then go back and get service again! That's pretty unfair towards the business.
Presumably that's the end of the relationship - you claw your money back via the CC and say good bye to the company.
What's the argument for being able to charge back but then wanting to (and the company being forced to, as I think you are suggesting) doing business with each other?
I suspect I am missing something.
In this case, telling a private business they are forced to entertain customers who have robbed them, it's outrageous. And while I understand that chargebacks CAN be legitimate, they also CAN and often are illegitimate. When I worked in small business computer repair, we literally got out of the business of selling expensive machines because more than half of all orders were fraudulent and were charge backed with zero recourse -- we lose the machine, we lose the money. We lost an incredible sum of money to thieves this way, and so being told we are forced to do business with them would have destroyed our business.
If you wanted to create a new class of online public service like Twitter and Google and increase regulation on them as one might do hotels, that's one thing. But a blanket requirement that all businesses must entertain customers who chargeback is a nonstarter, imo.
If you are a business doing more normal business, selling something with no sort of required subscription, something the customer does not depend upon you for, then you are still free to stop doing business with them (minus a few cases related to protected classes).
I'm so happy to see authorities are finally doing something about this abuse.
They're completely draining to deal with, usually fraudulent, and the only way to win one is to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the buyer is lying.
On other side the companies should then be able to sue you and you need to prove that charge was fraudulent. If you fail, you will carry full costs of both sides. Thus cutting down the fraud by chargebacks.
Companies can sue you for false, damaging claims you make, or failure to complete your end of a contractual arrangement.
> and you need to prove that charge was fraudulent
Well, no, the initial burden of proof should remain on the entity seeking a remedy, but civil standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence) means that that initial burden is not hard to meet.
It's not relevant to Netflix.
Does Apple also do this?
When I told about my issue to ICO, they basically gave advice to use different service... that's it.
There should be some sort of legal protection that if you want to exercise your rights, company shouldn't be allowed to cut you out for doing so.
> Epic has never allowed users to cancel or undo charges for Battle Passes or Llamas and did not begin allowing users to cancel Cosmetics charges until June 2019. Even then, Epic uses design tricks, sometimes referred to as “dark patterns,” to deter consumers from cancelling or requesting refunds for unauthorized V-Bucks charges.
> On July 20, 2018, an Epic Community Coordinator asked if there were any plans to add a confirmation step for in-game purchases, noting: “This is actually a huge complaints on our side and could remove most of the ‘excuses’ about accidental purchase: ‘I wanted to press Replay, my PS4 was in sleep mode’, etc. This is something I wanted to push forward but didn’t have time to build a real case around, has this already been discussed in the past?”
> In addition, Epic deliberately requires consumers to find and navigate a difficult and lengthy path to request a refund through the Fortnite app. To start, Epic hid the link to submit a refund request under the “Settings” tab on the Fortnite app menu, far removed from the purchase screen, even though requesting a refund is not a game or device setting. The Epic user experience (“UX”) designer who helped design the refund request path reported that he put the link there in an “attempt to obfuscate the existence of the feature” and that “not a single player found this option in the most recent round of UX testing.” When the designer asked whether he should make the feature easier to find, he was told by a superior, “it is perfect where it is at.”
Many more examples in this complaint doc: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1923203EpicGame...
Too bad there aren’t punitive damages. Hopefully this action by the FTC chills other businesses that use dark patterns or ban users for charge backs. Not offering competent customer service is a liability not a cost savings.
I really wish more companies were required to still allow account access after disputing a credit card charge.
If a company doesn't want to deal with this hassle, don't offer up "Sign in with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever" (I'm talking about Google/Apple/FB/whatever in this scenario), and don't "sell" digital goods that are hosted online.
I can understand cutting off a bad actor from making more purchases, but reclaiming their already paid for stuff feels pretty evil.
We, as software engineers (or working in the field), have the power to not implement these features when our employer asks us to do it.
Everyday we read about organisations using dark patterns in their (software) products and then we come to HN to complain about it.
How did these features get built? By whom?
Yes, I realise not everyone has the privilege to say "NO", but at least some of us can and should push back.
Isn't it funny how they $h!t on Apple/Google gate keeping practices? Is this a part of Project Liberty to bypass stores and scam users?
Google and Apple take insane cuts out of any money moving on their platform and while Epic uses predatory tactics to trap people into subscriptions Apple and Google do the same.
One reason I don't begrudge them their 30% is that I could easily lose that much or more trying to get some vendors to cancel subscriptions if I didn't have the easy options Apple provides. Epic is clearly one of them.
To his credit he came straight to me and told me he got all of the items “for free”.
After a huge muck around I finally got a refund (dealing with a combination of Nintendo and Epic) but the outcome was that I could no longer use a credit card to make purchase on my account ever again.
They’ve known for a long long time that accidental purchases happen and avoided having a decent path to refund (up until somewhat recently according to TFA) so I’m glad they’re being slapped with regulations.
Mobile games are so filled with this junk I don't even bother looking at them any more.
I avoid anything on PC that has a store, repeating season passes or virtual currency of any kind. It's even coloured my view of the types of add-on DLC that 20 years ago would have been a legitimate expansion pack, purely because it feels too similar to the dark patterns used in stores.
I refuse to give money to the companies that push these financial cons on people.
Both Epic and Apple are right on some issues, and horrifically wrong on others.
Loudly positioning themselves as pro-consumer makes this look more hypocritical than it would have otherwise.
The fact that I do not really own the games is a huge pain in my ass, but I love video games, and want to spend my actual money on them, so I'm kind of stuck.
Where do people get ideas like this?
There are more examples here about the patterns https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...
They already changed the system like half a year ago, guess they knew about the penalty back then https://www.fortnite.com/news/updates-to-fortnite-purchase-c...
Now for every purchase you have to hold the buy button for several seconds. You can't click/touch accidentally. Plus there is a proper refund system now.
But at least they don’t auto play movies that you have to pay for. Which it sounds like is what’s happening here.
So this line from the linked ftc post is incorrect:
"Epic charges for in-game purchases designed to enhance game play"
Money does not enhance game play.
Epic also hands out in-game currency every so often, so you can even collect skins for free after some time.
That said, kids gotta have the new skins.
What? Were these just five people who happened to be in the room? How do you receive only 5 comments?
Why do these penalties always end up as a fine for the company? They should also be forced to simply go and refund the amount they overcharged at least and preferably add a multiple too.
If your customers are just buying a limited license to use a digital product until cancelled at the whim of the company then make that 100% up-front obvious. And adjust the prices accordingly.
At least on my iPhone even if an app doesn't ask for confirmation before a purchase, Apple Pay shows a confirmation dialog that requires Touch ID.
Are there mobile flows that don't require a confirmation dialog by the payment service itself (in my case, Apple Pay)?
Or is this mainly about platforms outside of mobile, like PC games where Epic itself has your credit card or something?
Also why steam is still the leader despite having a terrible UI: they have been very good to their customers.
Steams core customer is the game developers/publishers, who they take a ~30% (last time I checked) cut from the profits from.
The people who buy games are simply users of Steam, and Steam has to treat them well, otherwise their actual customers (developers/publishers) won't get as much profits, and indirectly Steam.
But in the "store" part of the app, where you're purchasing things with the "v-bucks" in-game currency (which you've paid actual money for), the purchase was just a single button press. It was very easy to accidentally purchase when instead you meant to press the "back" or "preview item" button. Only recently did they change this to use the same "hold for 1 second" pattern already used in the battle-pass.
yeah, it would have absolutely done that.
Realize that you're statment is a euphemism. What you really mean is we have the choice between implementing a dark pattern or finding another job and letting someone else implement it. Stated this way it's a lot easier to understand people's behavior.
You incorrectly reduced the available options.
Here are a couple more options:
- convince your peers and supervisors why using dark patterns is trash
- just don't implement dark patterns and rather focus on useful features and bugfixes
- be loud about your distain of such request for dark pattern implementation and tweet, blog, write about it.
- ...
One could be tempted to think we're overpaid or have it too good as is, but we're basically lightning wizards making rocks think for us from sometimes thousands of miles away from where we physically are. When put that way it doesn't seem so farfetched to pay us a lot of money for our works.
s/implementing a dark pattern/performing any immoral or unethical act/g
The reality is that most of us think we're making the world a better place, when truthfully we're just trying to make a decent living, while making the unscrupulous shot callers rich. And that's the percentage that does actually want to make an honest living. Others will happily apply their knowledge to deceive and exploit, and then go on to make successful companies of their own. The circle of tech.
You don't, but, doctors and structural engineers do.
I was saying for years that a licensing proffeshional body, like the one other proffesions have, would improve things in our industry.
When was the last time a bridge fell down because someone boss bullied a structural engineer into suigning it off? They know you know that any engineer that agrees to do doggy shit is risking their licence, and it's not worth if for them.
This industry would improve significantly if it had a proffeshional body with teeth, and for that you need licensing like doctors and other proffeshions have.
Not necessarily that scenario, but this happens all the time. See the recent catastrophe in Turkey.
But I do agree that a tech license to uphold ethics makes sense. The problem is that the negative effects of tech aren't as clear-cut as from a bridge falling down. We still don't know what the long-term effects of social media are. Advertising rules all media, yet it's one of the most manipulative and harmful industries to have ever existed. These are not going anywhere because they have made many people very rich, and now these people have enormous influence over legislators and governments.
Speaking of legislators, they're hopelessly tech illiterate, and unprepared to regulate tech in any way. It took them decades to regulate industries that were literally killing people. How long do you think it will take for them to catch up to Big Tech?
I agree wholeheartedly. I would (and have) quit jobs where I was required to do things I considered unethical. Having to do that can suck and be a financial blow, but I think being able to keep my soul is worth it.
That's not the call to action. The call to action is to refuse to participate in unethical behavior.
Software developers should have a professional code of ethics. Other professions have them, why not computer scientists, computer engineers, and software developers? There is the ACM/IEEE-CS Software Engineering Code, but I don't know any professionals outside academia that remain ACM members, IEEE membership might remain relevant for computer engineers, so I may well be wrong in that regard.
Management can always find someone willing to behave un-ethically if they look.
Regulation and criminal liability tends to be the only way to eliminate shady business practices.
True, but that doesn't mean you should participate.
I think there are two things here -- refusing to participate in bad behavior is about maintaining your own humanity and holding true to your own ethical code. That it may not correct the company's behavior is irrelevant to this. The point is to not let the company corrupt you.
The other thing is how to correct the behavior of misbehaving companies. This is what you're addressing, and I think your conclusion is largely correct.
These are not mutually exclusive. Both are very important.
When I realised that I had a choice, I resigned.
Again, I do realise that I'm privileged and not everyone can afford to simply resign, but a lot of us can and we, the ones who can, have no excuse.
We are the "new" crack dealers
2Pac - Changes
You gotta operate the easy way
- I made a G today
but you made it in a sleazy way
Sellin' crack to the kids
- I gotta get paid
Well hey, well, that's the way it isI don’t love the “v bucks” vs real dollars they charge for things. though I get that the reward for those who grind isn’t actual dollars.
As someone who let a younger person play on my laptop, I will note my balance was quickly brought down to 0 though I had some new “emotes”.. lesson learned.
I’d rather just pay once for games, though that seems to be on its way out.
Unfortunately the only way to fight that is to not pay for anything else, but companies also know that's where the money's at.
I paid $40 for Overwatch. ActiBlizzard replaced what I paid for with F2P "Overwatch 2" and added "battle passes" and overpriced skins, and they seem to be going that way permanently now.
That is, I don't have access to Overwatch, the product I paid full price for, anymore. And the PvE content they marketed Overwatch 2 as still hasn't materialized either.
I didn't even enter a credit card at all for a few years, and once I did decide to buy in, there was a full checkout process. Even after they had my card info, there was no ambiguity when I was buying something.
I do understand that might be different on consoles though, since consoles have such a constrained and clunky UI compared to a PC. That seemed to be what the main complaint was getting at - apparently on consoles the 'view skin from your locker' button that you use to take a look at it is the same button used to one-click buy one from the shop? That certainly does sound like a dark pattern!
As for 'v-bucks', which aren't real money, I don't mind them. If you do stuff in-game you get tons of free v-bucks. I bought the battle pass once a couple years ago and it's been free ever since then, because doing the quests gives you enough v-bucks to buy the next one and, over time, enough free v-bucks for some skins too. Again if you get the battle pass once and play it, you'll end up with tons of free skins too. And they're all just cosmetic.
And sure, I'd generally rather just pay once for many games, but I think Fortnite actually does quite a good job when it comes to justifying paying more than once.
Every season there are new maps, new characters, new mechanics, sometimes whole new game modes. It really does keep the game fresh and fun. And keeps the player base coming back for years so there are always people to match against.
The "pay once and then that's all there will ever be" model very often sees a quick short life for online activity. Before long only a few die-hards are still around trying to find others to play with. And then the company shuts down the servers. Being able to self-host servers can help a small game live longer. But a game that requires 100 players per match? It would probably be a wasteland in a few months once the initial mass got bored.
If memory serves Klei might have a solution for this but I haven’t bought anything on steam in some time so I may be thinking of some other game.
Because Apple charges 30%. And Apple can keep that if there is a refund.
In this case, Epic is returning money. They would ideally be net zero on this whole debacle. You mistakenly bought $10 worth of skins, Epic collected that $10. Then you get refunded $10, Epic returns that $10. In the App Store scenario. You mistakenly bought $10 worth of skins, Apple collected that $10, gave $7 to Epic. Then you get refunded $10, Apple returns that $10, and then collects that $10 from Epic. Epic loses $3 on the exchange.
And if this is just refunding the purchases, it's kind of a good deal for Epic. As they essentially got an interest free loan from their customers.
Just a minor note: I believe credit card transaction fees are not refunded to the vendor, so there is still a non-zero cost to refunding customers which likely doesn't make it a "good deal".
(Disclaimer: It's been over a decade since I did anything related to payments, so this may be out of date, or I may be misremembering it.)
Definitely a win for the little guy. /s
No one wants to pay for games anymore, no one wants a pay to win system in a game, and cosmetic items seem like a waste of money to most. The result is the gaming industry pulling out all the tricks to try to separate the consume from his or her wallet to pay for content.
The video game industry is exceedingly profitable. It makes more money than the movie industry, at nearly $100 billion per year.
I don't think it's struggling to monetize. It seems quite successful at that.
Is that true, or are games so broken that nobody is willing to pay for them anymore. I've completely stopped buying almost any game that isn't on Apple Arcade because I know those games will be free of pay-to-win mechanics and nickel-and-diming you with more charges and dark patterns. On Apple's service, they all have to ask if they want to steal my data and resell it. I always say "No." I have a Steam account for playing older games I bought a while ago, but I buy maybe 1 game per year on it, if even, and only because it's not available anywhere else I'm willing to spend money. I'm playing more games than ever before now, too!
I find the acceptance of in-game stores rather unfathomable, but apparently the market has spoken as it represents the majority of industry revenue. So, it's unfortunately not going anywhere. What's wrong with players willing to drop $1000+ on a single game and/or have their game mechanics and other activities tainted by constantly pulling out their wallet? I know people in RL that do this, some to great personal financial harm, and haven't really gotten a good answer yet.
My biggest beef is when this is added in an update after I bought a game that didn't have it.
Either way I'm with all of the above comments, the mere intermingling of real world cash concerns with a game ruins the immersion for me. I have made a few exceptions to this rule where I think it's really warranted due to the quality of the game or people involved, but overall I hate this direction.
I have a hard time finishing games. When they add new chapters to the game they’ve moved the goal posts as it were, and that doesn’t feel good. If they introduce some new side quests and a new race, I’ve still finished the game (or let’s be honest, got 90% of the way).
But if I want to play Skyrim again as a telekinetic khajiit then I might pay for DLC.
You must be new to Bethesda games. You buy the "game of the year edition" with all DLC included when it's on 70% discount. You don't buy at launch :)
For example. Dirt Rally 2 honestly feels like a complete scam. The base game comes with 6 rally locations (not counting some rally cross tracks). And there are 7 more available as DLC. The base game feels intentionally slimmed down to make you feel you need to buy the DLC. it pads in extra junk content to make it seem long without actually having much there (like for example the rally cross tournaments make you compete in about 6 rounds of heats on the same short track to make it seem like there are lots of events, but in any other game all the rally cross tracks would have been a single event with perhaps one qualifier and one final on each track). Lots of the daily challenge type activities use the DLCs so are unavailable if you don't by them. All the locations are listed in the menus along with the not-included ones with just a small "DLC" flag across a corner. In addition there are perhaps dozens of cars available as DLC. And several very unclear things like the "flat out pack" which incorporates some of the other DLCs It very much feels like they've taken one game, a split it up into small parts to make you pay more for what would have been one purchase in the 90s. And the multiple small packs with overlapping content seem designed to make you accidentally pay more or buy the same thing twice through confusion. I completely refuse to engage with this and despite being a bit fan of rally games I won't touch this DLC, and tbh if I'd known the game was like this I wouldn't have even touched the base game.
On the other hand, Mario Kart 8 on switch comes with 12 "cups" each with 4 unique tracks, so 48 tracks in total. They have a single DLC which adds a further 12 cups and 48 more tracks for £22. (About half the price of the base game). 48 tracks in the base game feels substantial, I was happy with the game and didn't feel short changed. And the DLC that doubles the number of tracks also feels worth it without being a scam. But I have to be honest, because of the scammy nature of the rest of the business my default stance is to avoid DLCs so it was a while before I purchased this one, despite it being on the better end of the spectrum.
So there's a good way and a. And way to do DLC. But the bad way is poisening the whole market and putting me off considering the DLCs that are done well.
Requiring that all licenses be refunded at the face value in the event of cancellation would be one relatively equitable outcome. Or you can simply prohibit revocation - refuse to allow companies to ever invoke those terms except after a legal proceeding or similar oddball circumstances.
There is a similar effect around provision of services really. Once you reach the oligopolistic level of market consolidation (and there are services like Steam or Google where that's practically inevitable) then different rules really ought to apply. Which is a problem in a lot of areas, not just revocable licenses.
Even worse, for XL companies who force one account across multiple products, the two things can be completely unrelated. If Google is refusing to RMA my pixel 7 phone which arrived defective, I can't issue a chargeback on that phone purchase because they'll remove my access to the last 10 years of family photos, my email, my domains, and my GCP servers.
Sure you could argue that this is the exact reason you should diversify these things across different companies, but in some cases the tight integration between these products is a compelling feature. The price for that feature shouldn't include removing consumer purchase protections.
Very frustrating as a seller.
My suggestion would be to levy higher transaction fees on the business, and provide refunds to customers out of that. If a company is going to ban users for filing chargebacks, raise their transaction fees by 0.5% or 1% and have the CC company issue refunds themselves out of that pool.
At the end of the day, it's really a problem for the government to solve, though. Companies being able to get away with such blatantly anti-consumer policies is indicative of a substantial distortion in the market. I don't think this is something that would happen if there were robust competition in the market.
And I'm not totally up on the transaction fees, but they're typically in the low single digit percentages. And you only get hit once. So even on the higher side, you're looking at making up 3%. Which is way more likely than making up 30% in the same timeframe.
I could not agree more.
There's a compromise: they stop accepting any new business from you, but keep everything you've bought available: you pay 100%, you get 100%. It's what they should do, but they don't want to, because the current situation gives them a lot of power.
Hence a new regulation that tips the scales in the other direction to make Steam & co adopt a reasonable stance. The alternative would be to flat out force them to provide access indefinitely, but why not give them a chance to buy you out of your account if they really don't want to do business with you?
(Though, realistically speaking, either one will probably get you fired, sooner or later.)
https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation...
Right now they're doing nothing to discourage these patterns.
I cut Apple some slack because I worked in mobile when the iPhone was still a product demo. If you think Apple are assholes, you don't remember what carriers were like. Some of them were in the middle of figuring out how to white label phones so they could completely control the wireless space instead of share control with Moto, Nokia, Ericcson, etc. AT&T wanted you to buy an AT&T branded phone, not a Nokia. If memory serves, HTC was one of those white label manufacturers at the time.
The introduction of the Razr and the iPhone kept us from being in the worst timeline. And the App Store broke open an entire industry.
I don't cut Apple any slack because I worked in desktop when the iPhone was still a product demo. If you don't think Apple are assholes, you don't remember what freedom was like.
But they're also better at keeping out malware than google's app store I feel.
I could be wrong.
I had thought that electronic goods dealers (e-books, steam, whatever) had some issues with actually selling goods because of the fact that a sold good needs to continue to be accessible even if their platform becomes too expensive to operate at some point.
I wonder if we could shift the definition of sale to something more reasonable access-wise in the long term and come up with a reasonable path for resale since, with a third party host like steam, infinite transferability isn't really feasible - there are technicalities around account registration and the like that would need to place some limits on your right to resell the item.
With the current model you run into an inherent conflict between protecting content you aren't truly relying on the monetization of anymore and what's fair to users because it requires putting the publisher/publisher's agent in front of the access.
This has already happened with e-books, the rights are negotiated for a term and then when they're not renewed the copy is deleted off the consumer's device.
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...
Another odd place this might crop up is music licensing... if the license for some music expires, often the show will be re-mastered with a different track instead. But that could be viewed as a different "edition" of the work, and if you aren't allowed to yoink the user's purchased copy (or simply stream the newer edition) then you have a problem.
Frankly these issues have already gotten out of hand and forcing producers/authors to reach less predatory agreements may be a good thing. I'm not thinking of the small author here, they're already losing, but the estate of a dead artist of some smash-hit catalog will often milk that extremely hard.
It is for online only things, but if you buy a game and download it that shouldn't come with some assumption or requirement that I can forever re-download a copy. If I buy a download, it's fair to expect me to backup the thing I purchased. That works for music, movies, and ebooks - any DRM that requires a connection to some server, or an account should allow for transfers and companies who use that kind of DRM should be required to notify owners and patch the DRM out of products if the company no longer wants to maintain the servers and accounts provide that protection.
MMOs are still a problem since you aren't selling the game, just access to the systems that run it, but I think most people understand that.
Somebody get the EU on that, stat.
I sometimes wonder if it is going to take a massive Estate Law court case to push the needle on this. We're about to the point where "Grandma's Steam Library" is going to be big enough in expected cash value that descendants would meaningfully fight over it, and open up the can of worms that is current digital goods laws. (Including the fact that technically Grandma's Steam Library has *no* survivorship guarantees and Steam's TOS, like most TOS agreements in current digital services, terminates along with the person it was contracted with.)
I dunno, I've had a solution on hand that has consistently provided high-quality, seaworthy FLAC, MP3, MKV, MP4, etc... of all of my favorite media content. Since around maybe 2003, 2004.
- they side with the merchant and penalize the customer: they risk losing the customer, their purchases and other recurring fees. The merchant does nothing more for them.
- they side with the customer and hit the merchant: the merchant has no recourse outside of providing proof of wrongdoing on the customer side.
If they have these proofs, the issuer hits the customer, who would need to get back to the merchant to further fight the charges (the bank is now out of the picture).
If the merchant doesn't have any proof, their only possible action would be to cut off the issuer, but then they're potentially cutting off a whole slice of their customer base, so it's pretty unlikely.
All in all, the bank has very little incentive to side with the merchant from the start.
Treating them all in the same manner is a business problem on the merchant's end.
- Removal of advertised features
- Broken UX / Failure to deliver purchase successfully
(I think that last one is going to be increasingly common as people spin up a bunch of thin-clients over GPT-4 and other AI tools - I've already tried buying an AI art thing and it was just completely broken and had to do a refund through googlepay).
I understand this perspective, but my opinion is that the company running things is responsible for the people working under their banner. If the company doesn't make something right, that's on the company in the end regardless of who specifically did something wrong. So it doesn't look gray to me.
> sometimes you are at the mercy of losing a massive library of content
True, and that's a tough spot. Personally, that risk is why I never use a service that can put me in that sort of position. But I do understand that others may be willing to take this risk. It's still a risk, though, and I expect that the people who choose these sorts of services are aware of that and accept that they might lose.
Companies like Uber claim that the people are self employed when it suits them, and that they are not when it doesn't.
If people are working under their banner, regardless of whether those people are contractors, employees, volunteers, whatever, then in the end the company is responsible for what they do.
When covid hapepned, many airplane companies were not refunding cancelled flights, everyone who bought tickets with a credit card could do a chargeback, and buy another ticket. Everyone else was stuck in disputes for months, some for years, some never got money back.
When you pay with a debit card, you are paying with your money. So you could lose all the money you have, that's bad.
But the credit-card is the Bank's money. You could loose all the money you don't have. You could lose unlimited amount of money - after all, the bank decides if to accept a transaction. That's Much Much Worse.
So let's say you bought something for $500 on the credit card, then the bank has to collect this money from you.
So the Chargeback is really you telling the bank that someone stole from them, it was the bank's money after all, and that they cannot collect from you. It is then between the bank and the merchant to fight it out.
Basically the bank is providing you credit, they decide how much credit to provide, and they are also in charge of security -> making sure it was you and not someone stealing your credit card. So they hold the buck.
Common misconception. In reality, allowing for IAPs has changed the design of the game greatly. For example, those cosmetics you don't consider important have been made non attainable from normal gameplay.
Every little pixel sold as an IAP also means the design of the game is changed to give you an incentive to buy the IAP, instead of entertaining you.
Fortnite even allows you to enter competitive tournaments and compete for money without spending a dime. A player that spent $0 and is using the default skin is at no disadvantage vs a player that spent $1000.
One purchase of the Battle Pass (<$10) gets you many skins, emotes, and v-bucks, enough to get each season pass for free afterward, as long as you actually play it and are enjoying it.
And secondly, each season they change the map, add new mechanics, new skins, and the season pass quests change, sometimes even new modes of play. That keeps players coming back, which means you don't have to wait in the lobby for hours to try to get a match because everyone got bored.
I'm going into my 6th year playing on 1 season pass. Somewhere over 1000 hours of play. That's a whole lot of value for less than $10.00; less than 1¢/hour.
I have spent a couple times to try the original Save The World game (which was not the free-to-play model) and to buy two specific skins. But it was clear each time, and I did not see any tricky one-click-buy dark patterns.
However, I understand the UI is different on consoles, which have such limited buttons. It seems that's where the main complaint is. And that's a totally reasonable complaint if the button that usually does 'X' or 'Y' is at other times a 'One-click buy' button.
Really any game that uses just a console controller for anything more complicated or with more potential consequences than losing a game of Tetris really needs some safeguards due to their clunky UIs.
Chrome, not quite an electron app but as sluggish as one. It's not always been however the installer has always been known to be notorious.
These gifs was well known during the golden days, classics. NSFW-ish
Valve doesn't have enough taste to see a problem.
If steam changed all the "Buy" to "Rent" on it's website, nothing would actually change.
I'm familiar with Rent and I intuit what it means. I have access to an asset for a limited time, and then I can choose to continue renting it, or not. The decision is in my hands.
License might be a better word. Because what they're selling is a "one time payment for use of this asset for an undetermined amount of time" - that's not "buy" but it's also not "rent".
When my license ends it's likely I can't get another. Certainly its not my decision to make.
The period of the license us unknown - till you block my account, till you go under, till you decide this service is no longer available, till _your_ license-to-license expires, and so on.
So yeah, I don't think it's Rent.
That is not implied by the term rent. Very often rentals are for a fixed amount of time. Especially for video game rentals, back when they were common.
I think rent implies you have limited control better than license does.
Interestingly, I stopped using eBay precisely because they left me stuck with a fraudulent charge. The process of trying to dispute it using their system was so drawn out, though, that by the time eBay told me to go pound sand, it was too late to do a chargeback. But even so, I'm certainly not willing to risk trusting them again.
You could even say that steam is a customer of the developers (I buy your game at x to sell for y), and the average person is a customer of steam and the devs.
I don't really see the customers or the developers as the core. Both groups tie into each other in a big network effect.
If game developers and publishers could get the same audience without steam and the 30% tax, they would in a heartbeat.
They'd probably cut the price a little to expand sales and enjoy the wider margin. Margin that could be spent on salaries and growth.
Thankfully Valve is investing its proceeds in developing competitive products that enrich the industry and not just skimming.
30% of the price is distributed to Valve instead of developers.
Whether that results in developers obtaining lower profits or users paying higher prices is entirely subjective; that depends on what would happen otherwise, which is categorically unprovable.
If it's a point of issue between me, Valve, and the game developers, at the end of the day it's my decision that matters because I have the money and if I choose not to spend it the whole thing stops working.
Take away valve and then I go straight to the source and purchase games from the developers directly, it's going to be inconvenient, but it'll be fine.
Take away the developers and valve will fund game development and start making their own stuff like Netflix has with all the media companies.
Take away the customers? Game over.
Of logic works all right when you're talking about Google and the fact that the advertisers are the real customers, because of the end of the day the advertisers have the money and when it is advertisers versus users the advertisers always win.
It's important to be the guy funding the system at the end of the day, otherwise you get screwed.
No really, the developers have 30% removed from a sale which goes to Steam. People who buy games don't see a price + 30%, it's the developer who sees the fee when they look at the sales. Otherwise all receipts from Steam would be $GAME_PRICE + $STEAM_FEE, but it's simply $GAME_PRICE and then the developer when looking through their sales, that see $GAME_PRICE - $STEAM_FEE.
This is not me as the user paying. Gotcha.
The customer pays for /everything/ /always/ under /all/ circumstances. It's not cost plus pricing, vendors will charge as much as the customer will part with. Customers are willing to part with less when competition pushes prices down. That 30% is definitely keeping prices higher to the customer in any remotely competitive market. (I say nothing about whether that is a good thing or bad, whether that is cheap or expensive - it's just nuts not to know the customer is paying it, that's whose pocket the money comes out of).
In the worst case they stop allowing an account to make new purchases while keeping what they’ve bought. Is that an objectionable outcome?
https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/term...
> All Transactions are final.
Purchased something by mistake? Tough.
> If technical problems prevent or unreasonably delay delivery of Content, your exclusive and sole remedy is either replacement of the Content or refund of the price paid, as determined by Apple.
Unhappy? Your only recourse is to beg Apple for your money back. They may say no.
> From time to time, Apple may suspend or cancel payment or refuse a refund request if we find evidence of fraud, abuse, or unlawful or other manipulative behavior that entitles Apple to a corresponding counterclaim.
These corporations think charge backs are evidence of abuse and fraud, so yeah.
> c. Termination. This Standard EULA is effective until terminated by you or Licensor. Your rights under this Standard EULA will terminate automatically if you fail to comply with any of its terms.
Your fraudulent chargebacks are reason enough for them to kill your account, invalidating every dime you ever spent on it.
There's no point in even reading these silly documents. They're all the same, everywhere. Always assume they do this.
Maybe an 'Oops! I didn't mean to do that.' undo button immediately after buying some. But it would be better just to make the checkout process explicit like they do on PC.
Just so we are on the same page, is the issue that they are not calling the police and saying "my kid has used my creditcard, could you prosecute them for fraud?"
> The company also made it easy for children to make purchases while playing Fortnite without requiring any parental consent.
So the kids had their parent's credit card on file for a free to play game and this is Epic's fault? Wouldn't having their credit card on file to buy anything they want be consent at some level? The same level of consent as any other online shop?
The only reason for the settlement is that this is one of those "cost of doing business" fines for Epic. They are out of this for a relatively small amount of money, and the FTC gets a "win" out of it.
Oh, so yes to your question.
Exactly, thats why you are not allowed to sell them alcohol, drugs and worst of all, financial products like loans.
> That's what's really happening, right? Parents have handed over their credit cards and are having some misgivings about the purchases their children are making
Children below age of criminal responsibility can't be prosecuted. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?
That's not a problem really. Think of country clubs. Your investment is completely lost the second you stop paying.
I understand that folks may dislike the subscription model, but it's not illegal.
The problem is for services where I pay a la carte to build a "personal" library of things, like steam games, Google Play movies, Amazon Kindle books, etc. I've paid a one-off price for the digital content with the expectation that I will have access to that content indefinitely. If I am abusing the platform, causing issues for others, or generally and blatantly violating ToS in a major way, then I think that's a different story. But if I need to dispute one transaction, then the ability to immediately remove all access to previously purchased content immediately, indefinitely, and frequently without review or appeals - is very anti-consumer.
It effectively nullifies existing consumer protection laws. I will never issue a chargeback or complaint against Valve (Steam) or Google, even if I have a perfectly legitimate reason to do so - as loss of those accounts after all of these years would likely be more costly to me than most erroneous charges I'm likely to see.
By steam sells games for $60 a piece, they are not a subscribtion service. You can't have it both ways.
It's really cool that Steam has a working refund system but I'm not sure it helps with the explanation of why refunding on Epic is an insurmountable challenge.
I always get a warm feeling when a game I'm interested in has an itch.io link, but I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking it'll ever replace Steam, even if Steam had to stop calling itself a store. Steam is just far too established, and the network effect is just way too strong.
The moment you made the account a pre-requisite to use something I have already paid for - whether it's software, music, or an internet connected lightbult, is the moment the account stopped being a privilidge.
Do you see where it is headed next? We have internet connected cars and door locks. There are subscribtions for a butt-heater in a car.
Withing the next 5 years someone will freeze to death because a company has pulled or made a mess of their account.
There is no other line of business where you can unilaterally revoke a service that the customer has already paid for. Where continous service requires some conditions or behaviour, this is spelled out in a contract - these companies change their terms on a whim.
> They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination."
That doesn't really apply to buying music though, does it? If Amazon banned my account, that wouldn't prevent me from listening to the MP3s I've bought from them. It would only prevent me from re-downloading them from their servers if I somehow lost all of my local copies.
But if I buy a CD from a physical store, they also don't give a me another copy for free if I lose it (even without account termination entering into it), so I'm not really any worse off with the digital download.
This is literally the nature of physical vs digital goods.
We can, and should, do better for customers than the current systems from Steam and Amazon (among others) allow.
For games on Steam and movies basically anywhere, the current system is that after I buy the game/movie, I can watch/play it for as long as I have access to the account. If I lose the account or the service shuts down, I'm fucked. That sucks.
For games on GOG or MP3s basically anywhere, the current system is that I buy it and then I can play the game/music forever as long as I don't lose the downloaded files. If I do lose the files, I can still redownload them as long as the service is still operating and I still have access to the account.
The second system seems fine to me.
On the other hand, if you use Amazon Unlimited or Amazon Music Prime, you cannot download music as MP3s. You need to use a player that supports their DRM.
This seems entirely reasonable: No one thinks that by subscribing to Unlimited that they're actually purchasing a copy of every single song forever. It's very much known that it's a subscription.
If there was some other system out there that was easier to manage subscriptions in and only takes 10% it wouldn't matter because Apple wouldn't allow you to use it.
Welcome to governments that are actually responsive to protecting their citizens. It doesn't have to be the way it is in the US with corporations holding all the cards, that's just regulatory capture in action.
That's how the EU works in general, the balance is shifted way towards consumer protections - even if companies don't like it, tough. You get a default 2 year warranty on everything, no questions asked, and if the items fails past that due to an inherent defect in design or manufacture, they have to replace it even if it's outside the warranty window. And that's just normal, that's how everything is expected to run. USB cables, charges, all that crap, the EU does what it thinks is best for its citizens' lives, and while specific things sometimes do go wrong, on net it's a massive benefit to everyone's quality of life.
Companies exist to serve us, folks, not the other way around. It doesn't have to be this way. "Oh we put something in the terms of service"? Yeah bullshit. Mandatory binding arbitration in your contract of adhesion? Arbitrate on deez nuts.
The US is completely obscene by the standards of the rest of the developed world.
I made a complaint to the advertising standards authority in the UK. They agreed with my complaint and forced the publisher to get the URL’s working again. I’m not sure how long they will keep working, but I imagine they have to at least for as long as the book is in print.
Not the EU, but I imagine the EU has a lot more clout than the ASA does.
My main point is that it doesn't have to be that simplistic.
If you're worried about shell-company games, well, that can be legislated against too. So far the EU hasn't, as far as I'm aware, let any companies out of any previously-mandated penalties for violating consumer protection with "That was google, this is ABC" bullshit. They are, as I stated, much much less interested in playing games than the US is.
Your "software X" is not worth hosting any more? Fine, then someone else can host it, maybe they will find it profitable.
Maybe even it could be a former employee.
If something is under pretty active use, that should have been in the original budget, but also you can put it on cloudflare R2.
For the long tail of perpetuity, you can pay Hetzner $1200 a year for a server with 45TB (plus parity) and a gigabit port.
They say, "Buy for kindle" or "Buy in iTunes"
The contract they advertise doesn't match the fine-print in their clickwrap contract
> as long as the company decides to host it
If you put a clause like that into a rental agreement for a house, and try to collect, it would be thrown out as soon the judge stops laughing.
If I rent a house, and have already paid a year of rent, my landlord can't just wake up one day and kick me out in the middle of the year. These companies can just remove you on a whim.
Furthermore, landlord has obligations towards me: he must fix the house if it is leaking, and if the house is rendered unlivable (i.e. the roof caves in) and it's his fault, he has to provide me with alternative accomodation.
For a contract to be valid, it must have duraton. If it's a lease that says '9999 years', then the landlord/freeholder can't just sneak in at night and demolish the building.
Having something physical is meaningless when every piece of software comes with T&Cs that say it's dependent on server support.
Ostensibly you could return it, but then I've seen many things that say "opening this container means you have accepted the terms", but even if not subsequent installation comes with mandatory T&Cs to use the product. You're meant to be able to return the product for a refund if you don't agree to the terms, but my recollection is that companies are terrible and fight you on it.
Then they should be forced to clearly explain that and not be allowed to put words like "buy" and "purchase" in their advertising because those words have very specific meanings. That they've been allowed to basically get around deceptive advertising laws by inserting some legalese into their TOS, which are deliberately written in the most inaccessible way as possible, is repugnant.
In the case of Amazon Music, if you haven't fallen for the subscription nonsense, you actually are buying the MP3 files. You can download them and then it's on you to move them around as you need. Amazon will also "keep a copy in the cloud for you, and let you play it wherever." You lose that when you lose your account, but if you went to the trouble to download your MP3, that's yours.
Slight pedantic nit, some games on Steam are DRM-free (though this is in no way indicated, you can find a list online, though*), those you can back up and keep using even if your account gets banned.
* https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
Buying movies on Amazon is a different matter entirely, but the comment and my reply were specifically about music.
I responded to a comment from someone who apparently didn't realize that Apple's subscription system makes it exceptionally easy to cancel subscriptions.
They said:
> while Epic uses predatory tactics to trap people into subscriptions Apple and Google do the same
Which is as far from my experience as it is possible to get.
The comments from people stating that Apple exercises platform lock-in seem roughly as relevant as the current price of tea at a Foxconn factory in China.
RockeyMoney is great, but not only is it irrelevant in the extreme to the original comment at the root of this thread, it's very much an apples-to-guavas comparison with the Google/Apple/Epic/Valve/etc model of operation.
Or they can just stop using terms like "buy" and otherwise implying ownership, instead making it clear you're just leasing the game.
I've often been off put by books that advertise that they link to some sort of digital content because I can't trust that said content will be around when I want to actually access it. It never occurred to me they could be forced to host it, and I'm glad someone did that to at least one publisher once
It also emboldened me to make complaints about other things, for example I complained that a local internet provider was advertising having the fastest internet in my country, even though I had internet from another provider that was 3x the speed. They did eventually change their advertising and the funny thing is that I received update letters from my local advertising authority for about two years, addressed to sone bigwig executives at Sky (who had also complained) and… me, a random nobody.
I had zero skin in that one, but felt that advertisements should have to be accurate.
As for not knowing where to send the complaints, yeah, I get it, it was something I wondered about for a while too before I decided the advertising standards authority. My reasoning was: the book was still listed on their website and on Amazon, and the blurb clearly stated that it comes with videos, so it’s part of the purchasing decision. So since it was advertised that way, it’s clearly false advertising. I took a chance and it turned out correct.
Of course not all agencies are quite so receptive or active regarding complaints so it’s hit and miss, but since you can usually do it online in a few minutes I felt it was worth five minutes of my time to try anyway. If I’d had to send a physics letter, for example, I wouldn’t have done it. My experience dealing with the advertising standards authority from the UK, though, was a very good one. They were quick and communicative.
Apple has one of the best subscription management tools as a seller platform (though I do personally think Steam's is better - but that's just preference)... but a better subscription management system would be providing an interoperable system that third parties could interact with and help control.
We're only really talking Apples-to-Guavas because these systems are configured to defend themselves from any cooperation.
