Steam no Longer Helping Scammed Customers

Not too long ago, Steam added the ability to refund games, as long as you hadn’t played them or owned them for too long. The Internet, of course, rejoiced, because this was a gigantic customer right we’ve been demanding for a long time and Steam implementing it, the biggest digital distributor in the world, had giant implications for digital and customer rights.

But Steam isn’t about to roll out the red carpet and let people walk over it, now that it’s proven a willingness to cave to customers’ demands in mass. So, not long after giving us a privilege, it has now announced that it is revoking one, albeit a significantly smaller one: it will no longer be offering replacements for digital items lost in scams within their own games.

...Pretty minor, but hell, it’s still a thing.

Time was, back in the day, if you could prove someone had scammed you out of a rare or a valuable item, you could petition Valve and, if they were feeling generous, they’d give you a free copy of the item back. However, this had the unintentional effect of ‘flooding’ the market with duplicates where there should be none… and meant some clever players could get multiple versions of very, very rare items. Therefore, while Steam has stated it is sympathetic with the plights of scam victims, they will no longer be compensated… and should instead just, you know, work on not getting scammed in the first place.

So that’s that. It kind of sucks, in some respects, but this was always above-and-beyond customer service where most would merely give an ambiguous shrug, so… it can hardly be said we’re losing something. More like, for the sake of digital good scarcity and capitalism, we're losing a safety net that was pretty easy to avoid to begin with.

…Also, a hard lesson for people who can’t spot a scam. I guess.