For those of you who don't live in "90%-Hostile-Desert-Land", the ACCC is the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, it's the Aussie equivalent of the FTC, an independent government authority whose goal it is to protect consumer rights. Anyway, the ACCC has filed a lawsuit stating that: From my point of view there are two things stopping Steam from being perfect: Refunds and quality control. I think at the very least this may serve as a wakeup call for Valve and get them to fill the gaps in their service. http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/accc-sues-us-video-games-giant-valve-20140829-109w0y.html Fun fact: Only two news networks (so far) have covered this, 7 News and SBS. And SBS is that strange hybrid-funded channel nobody watches with all the weird foreign shows. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-relea...misleading-consumer-guarantee-representations
At the same time they usually leave those 2 for natural selection. Basically, their marketplace will sell anything with enough worth to sell, and they are just sellers for a variety of game and not affiliated with the games. Any sort of quality control, may also affect greenlight. Anything affecting greenlight will honestly do a lot of good in trade for a particular evil. A lot of indie games that are decent, will pretty much have to be petitioned by viral audience on an individual basis, to get on Steam. In that reguard, I don't mind Steam offering to sell anything to anyone, and it is a shame people don't realize what they are buying. I don't see for instance, how people can't look up gameplay footage and specs on PA.
Valve needs to make sure that games from 1990 that were published on Steam recently aren't marked as "Released March 2014" because that's completely misleading. On top of that they need to keep a closer eye on games that are getting attention for the wrong reasons, eg Earth: Year 2066. Which was pulled eventually.
Besides, what I think most companies do when it comes to Australia, is they have a regional version. Valve may do this with steam, region locking them out of greenlight and select titles...
And nobody wants it. If I lived in Australia, and it happened, I'd find me someone even partially responsible for this to kick in the nuts for it.
I feel like all that people really need is to hold themselves accountable. Aussies don't need a government group to protect them from making dumb game choices anymore than people in the US need someone telling them what kind of car they have to buy. Video games on Steam are usually cheap and in the end worth about $60 at the most. It's not like you loose hundreds of dollars by making a stupid purchase because you were drunk one Saturday night. People these days...
Well, the sad thing is, like jbeetle said, there is no forcing them to both maintain responsibility for every developer selling a game's quality, AND sell in Australia. They will inevitably not do the second if it means not doing the first, if it means it's cheaper. Again, technically it will be cheaper for them just to allow AAA titles that already have a region locked version for Australia. No indie games whatsoever, no greenlight. Just any AAA title that presents a copy that was approved for rating by the Australia ratings board (whoever that is). The funny thing is, you can get around region locking easily, but if your account purchases out of region lock and you try to file against steam like that, not only is it hard to follow through since your at liability outside of region locking, but they will probably ban your account and it will be hard to argue THAT either. So, best case scenario, you can still bypass region locking, but if you complain they can ban steam accounts just for the jollies.
Greenlight is shite, the old way of submitting games was a lot better. Look at all the crappy games coming through, it used to be an exclusive thing to be on Steam, you'd be in the "New releases" list for at least a week, now you won't even last a few hours. And pretty much everything you buy online is usually covered by a "time for consideration" as well as a refund policy in case you consider your purchase a wrong one. Obviously they could exclude online games (just like a store would, due to keys being used already), but people should be able to refund their games (except for early-release, that's a choice you made).
Or better yet, Valve should implement time trials. Like the free weekends. You can try the full game for 2 hours (or on a per game basis), then you have to buy it.
Some games have less than 2 hours. I like and dislike greenlight. That is where a lot of **** is coming through, and it does suck not being "new" for longer than a day, but it does get more undiscovered talent as well. If only there was a cheap system that would let the talent in easily, while capping out crap. Might be as simple as keeping greenlight, but it has to get a lot more votes so it must be truely that good. Or even better, force people to vote to, like kickstarter, authorize purchasing upon it releasing on greenlight, so they have to dedicate a purchase of the game behind backing the game for greenlight.
Greenlight games should have demos, no demo, no greenlighting. A lot of games coem through without a single visible piece of gameplay.
