Valve Corporation, tired of paying arbitration fees, has removed a mandatory arbitration clause from Steam’s subscriber agreement. Valve told gamers in yesterday’s update that they must sue the company in order to resolve disputes.
The subscriber agreement includes “changes to how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved,” Steam wrote in an email to users. “The updated dispute resolution provisions are in Section 10 and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration. We’ve also removed the class action waiver and cost and fee-shifting provisions.”
So if it’s worse for the consumer for valve to allow class action lawsuits, then should the consumer see all the other companies who force arbitration as the better outcome?
Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn’t just say “come sue us” if they weren’t wholly confident that they weren’t about to be losing any cases any time soon.
This isn’t some huge “win” for the people; gamers aren’t gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam’s userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.
Other companies didn’t pay the arbitration fee so valves system was a bit better than the rest. Realistically, the consumer always gets fucked.
The point is more that Steam is getting praised for this, while it’s just to make class action lawsuits, like the one they were just served with for their anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, much costlier for the other party.
Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.
Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.
I think this still eliminates class action suits. According to the article quotes, they still define the court and terms under which you can sue.