In America? Yes absolutely, you can sign away pretty much all of your rights with a TOS.

In other countries even if you sign the TOS it may not be legally binding thus you may not actually be bound by it.

I'm pretty sure that the law in the UK gives you a 7 day cooling off period - but this from valve... the next evil empire in the making?

There's lots of rules against that sort of thing in the EU/UK, and it's one of the reasons Valve added their refunds.

This is one such example in the UK: http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/consumer-contracts-regulations

Although that linked law is total bullshit really, and even though it's newer it's still showing how the UK government is out of date:

QuoteIf you want to download digital content within the 14 day cancellation period you must agree to waive your cancellation rights

So technically, Valve are within the law.

Although Valve have already warned me about asking for too many refunds, pathetic really.

Too many refunds? Really? There should not be any warning/punishment system for wanting to get a refund for an item in my opinion.

Fact is, I even requested a refund once, for £0.02 :-P Purchased a (really cheap) game on steam but it wouldn't boot at all, so got a refund. I didn't get any warnings etc though. But they did make me wait 7 days before it was "credited" back to my account -.-

Yes, they took 7 days to refund £0.02....

Yep, I've refunded six games in total since the refunds came in, and apparently that's a suspicious amount. Half of which I very much imagine they had lots of refunds to do for as well that wasn't just me.

Suspicious? Did you give them reasoning for the refund? aka broken game, not what you expected etc?

As far as I'm aware they also changed their trading card policy to disable card drops until after the refund period is over so realistically you can't "gain" anything by buying and refunding games.

How is getting a refund deemed suspicious? Just to be clear, these were games you yourself purchased? Not ones gifted by devs for review?

Offtopic: Steam should go a step further to make this platform more unique at the global market and allow player to trade redeemed games with other users for cash at the steam community market. Maybe 30% of the marketprice goes to the developer, 20% to steam, and 50% to the seller. Compared to a cd second hand market the developer will still own a bit and people are able to sell played games and invest into new games.

The publishers fear reselling more than "pirates". Most DRM these days is not (primarily) to prevent pirated copies but to prevent legal reselling. With DVDs the publishers can't do all that much if they don't include some account lock-in, but you can be sure that they will not allow Valve to implement such a feature anytime soon.

Besides, one of the ideas behind Steam's pricing scheme seems to be that digital copies that can not be resold, are thus cheaper. I agree with that overall idea, and don't think reselling is necessary then. If a game is still to expensive for you at lauch, just wait for the first big sale, which also comes much sooner on Steam than in a Brick and Mortar games store.

Quoting: liamdaweYep, I've refunded six games in total since the refunds came in, and apparently that's a suspicious amount. Half of which I very much imagine they had lots of refunds to do for as well that wasn't just me.

It don't help the refund situation when people refund a game like alien: isolation because it don't have a benchmark Which to me is abusing the system.

Quoting: pete910

Quoting: liamdaweYep, I've refunded six games in total since the refunds came in, and apparently that's a suspicious amount. Half of which I very much imagine they had lots of refunds to do for as well that wasn't just me.

It don't help the refund situation when people refund a game like alien: isolation because it don't have a benchmark Which to me is abusing the system.

Well, that's Phoronix for you. Not doing any research is his thing.