This sadly is a bad idea, as it’ll get your entire store account banned (Steam, battle.net, etc). Chargebacks work great until the whole account matters.
Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?
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Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.
But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.
Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.
I think the sort of "legal" argument here is imagine if you were running a SaaS and somebody did a chargeback despite using the service. I think most people _would_ lock the account and refuse to do business with the chargebacker as a default reaction!
Of course the reality of these other places being the marketplace and the service provider and the game publisher is a classic anti-trust issue.
Imagine if the SaaS charged 100x the agreed price for the last month, refused to fix the charge, and when you issued a chargeback, they deleted all your lifetime data.
Yes? I do not understand how you would think that anything but an extremely antagonistic relationship would result from a chargeback. Not saying they "deserve to keep the money" or whatever (of course not), but a chargeback is pretty much crossing the rubicon in terms of a business relation between two parties.
Not saying "don't chargeback ever", and obviously in your scenario the SaaS is at fault, really.
> accounts locked for Hardware chargebacks will not be unlocked until the associated hardware is returned.
Wait, does this mean that if someone hacks your Steam account, and uses your saved payment info to order a Steam Deck shipped to someone other than you, that you have to choose between losing your Steam account forever or losing the money?
Steam often asks for the card's CVV2 even for saved cards. I don't know what the exact criteria are, but I'm pretty sure any order over a certain amount (which a Steam Deck would definitely be) would trigger this.
I have actually been thinking if I should start a new Steam account or several. The blast radius of losing the current one for some reason would be devastating. Also wondering if it would be at all effective (not too hard to see the same credit card used between two accounts).
Steam could alleviate the new account requirement by having a "cheat" counter. If you do more than, say, five actions that look like a cheat, then a real person on their side looks at the problem. Or, have a cheat counter that waits until twenty or fifty cheating actions before auto-banning, if they want to make it cheaper for them.
Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?
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Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.
But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.
Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.