PC gamers rejoiced earlier this year when Valve Corp announced that it would be implementing a new refund policy that would allow Steam users to return any game within 14 days of purchase (or release, in the case of a pre-order) as long as they had not played it for more than two hours. While Valve’s new policy was a major step forward for digital game consumer rights, it was apparently not enough for French consumer protection group UFC Que Choisir, which has filed a lawsuit against Valve over policies that it says violate consumer protection laws in France.

The group listed a number of complaints against Valve, including (translated summary via Reddit user Silencement):

• Steam’s Subscriber Agreement explicitly forbids users to sell their games, despite the transfer of ownership of digital products/licenses being legal
• Valve declines any responsibility in case they get hacked and users’ personal info get stolen
• Valve claims ownership on the rights of any user-created content uploaded on Steam
• It is impossible to get the money on your Steam Wallet back if your account is closed/deleted/banned
• Valve applies Luxembourg’s consumer law regardless of the user’s country

Valve has yet to publicly respond to the lawsuit.

Valve’s stance on account theft

Valve agrees with Que Choisir that hacking and account theft are serious problems on Steam, but the company places the much of the onus for account security on its users.

In a recent blog post, Valve noted that account theft has increased “twenty-fold” since the introduction of Steam Trading, but placed some of the blame for this on users who have not activated two-step authentication on their accounts.

As a result, Valve recently implemented a number of limitations on accounts without two-step authentication to encourage users to take advantage of the feature and to improve security for those who do not.

Image courtesy of Valve Corp