Not sure why you didn't figure that out earlier.... but yes. I don't think Valve is going to drop support for a major economy.
Neat, are you going full sword and board or are you mixing in cheats magic? Australia is a major economy? I don't think they'll drop support altogether, but if they have to jump through enough hoops I can definitely see them reducing the availability of new games till this is all settled.
Morning star and board actually. With a grand lance and giant gofluckyourself sword as alternatives for other enemies. Ouch. Let me put it this way: There are about 2-3 million Australian users on Steam. If they pull out: They lose 2-3 million customers to competitors like GOG and GMG. The big publishers are going to stop making PC games exclusive to Steam unless they also want to lose a massive amount of sales. The rest of the world sees all this because this is the Information Age, and Valve gets buried under so much bad PR that even HL3 wouldn't bring them back to the top. I don't see how they can arbitrarily decide not to sell a game to a specific country when a publisher says otherwise.[/QUOTE]
Australia is a bit bigger than the state of New York population wise. New York is a major state, but I wouldn't consider it a significant market in the global perspective on its own. Germany has had games restricted or unreleased a few times for legal reasons and they're much larger than Australia. There was that whole L4D fiasco that was pretty huge. Though that is an insane number of accounts in australia. Google is telling me that's 10% of the population. That's nuts. The issue of not getting games isn't on Valves end. It's possible that the country might not allow the "import" of games till the court proceedings are over. Valve might have to make various checks before sending games over. Publishers might. The more work that needs to be done to get something into a country, the less likely things are to get in. It's unlikely AAA games will be barred, but the better indie titles might have to be delayed or canceled if the country rides this too hard. And they might be forced to temporarily suspend services during legal proceedings no matter what the verdict. It is extremely unlikely that this means good things. For anybody. EDIT: Unrelated note the Jupiter Hell sccreenshots look NUTS. I'm hoping for an ascii mode, but if facing matters it's unlikely. I wasn't following this closely, so I had no idea they were going full 3d. more shots
I don't think they'll prevent them from doing business until it's all over. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. All they want is for Valve to abide by our refund laws, which are not complicated, and they're already halfway there. I can't imagine what "checks" they'd have to perform. I mean, it's not like we're hosting Russian nuclear missiles in our backyard.
It can be handled a bunch of ways. No idea how Australia does things. When a company is accused of breaking a law, steps are generally made to prevent them from breaking the law while the court proceedings happen. The easiest way to do that is to prevent sales during the period. The checks that would need to be made are that refunds can be carried out. As somebody who went 3 months without a steam account because my bank refused to send money properly I can attest to that not being as simple as it should be. I don't know the process that money goes through in Steam. The burden could be on Valve or it might be on the individual companies. They might do nothing. They might do something I didn't mention. Best case scenarios are still neutral, not good. So I'm staying stubbornly pessimistic.
http://www.steamidlemaster.com/ If you're like me and you have a boatload of leftover bundle games you don't plan on playing this is a great way to milk them for cards. It doesn't install the games, just spoofs games you own for the purposes of play time to get cards.
