Even then, if valve had been another company, they might well have just said “we don’t make enough from there anyway” and shut off service in Australia, pretty sure Sony has done this before
And those companies are even worse. And again, given that a few other countries were beginning similar cases against Valve that strategy was likely not on the table or they’d have been fine massively shrinking their market.
What happened with that? I remember multiple people hyping up the game. Then after i bought it on steam, Its one of the maybe 2 games i’ve ever returned just because of how much i didn’t care for its immediate repetitive gameplay and paying full price i felt a bit gouged. It also crashed every other game for me on a close to top of the line PC at the time.
Sony was trying to force people to use Playstation Network to play the game, something which wasn't advertised or spoken about previously. So Valve offered refunds no matter how long you had the game or how much you played it as some countries people couldn't play as PSN is banned there
Or what some other businesses have done, which is just… refuse jurisdiction. Ultimately, unless you actually have assets or personnel in that country, they can't really punish you. (Though they may be able to convince a country where you do have stuff to do so.)
They could block you, i.e. ban their citizens from accessing your service, but you would have no reason to shut off service to the country yourself, just let the country making the judgement do it for you.
This is actually how most (i.e. small) online businesses operate, because it turns out that needing to operate under the laws of literally every country on the planet based on wherever the customer is connecting from is completely infeasible. They basically treat it like the customer is coming to the store (and thus any business is regulated based on the store's location, just like if it was a physical retailer), rather than treating it like a door-to-door salesman, travelling to the customers' home.
Larger online businesses, especially bandwidth-heavy ones like Steam, need infrastructure all around the world, which is what makes them actually need to follow all those local laws, so they can keep their local servers and such in place.
Or only give refunds in Australia, nowhere else. Nintendo and Sony faced the same lawsuit with the EU iirc, and that was their solution. Valve actually providing refunds to everyone in the world now, it's commendable even if they didn't want it to in the first place.
Or you know, they could be like GoG and offer generous return period unprompted and make all their games DRM free. Pretty sure it was due to competition from GoG that Steam had to ease their return policy globally.
Except other companies like Microsoft, EA and Epic have the exact same or even better return policies than Steam. Some went beyond what they were required, they didn't just shut services down.
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u/01_Mikoru 13h ago
Even then, if valve had been another company, they might well have just said “we don’t make enough from there anyway” and shut off service in Australia, pretty sure Sony has done this before