My son is a gamer. He’s the President of the Video Game Club at his school. He loves to play video games, talk about video games, dream up new video games or characters for existing games, he’s even gotten me to buy stock in game companies. Yeah, he’s a die-hard gamer. So, when he asked if I wanted to learn how to play his favorite game (the one I’ve been hearing about for years), I jumped at the chance to do some serious bonding with my teenager. If you’ve got teens, you know this was a rare opportunity and one I dare not miss.
So, we proceeded to set me up with an account on Steam (steampowered.com) which is how you access Dota2 (the favored game). After jumping through numerous hoops: sign up for an account, log in to your email, wait for your confirmation, go back to the web site and try to enter the CAPTCHA (the little letter box that lets the site know you aren’t a robot); Steam has the worst CAPTCHA ever! It took us 8 tries to get it to take our entry! Finally, I was in! Oh wait, not really….
You see, Steam has an evil plan to extort money from unsuspecting Moms. Ok, not just from Moms but it is extortion. I’m able to play Dota2 (a free game by the way) with Limited Access unless I spend money on the site. As if I haven’t already spent hundreds of dollars on Steam buying games for my son’s account. Limited Access means I can’t “friend” anyone, which means I can’t play on a team; Dota2 is a team game; which means I can’t play the game with my son, which was the entire purpose of this little excursion on the extortion express in the first place!
I decided to contact Steam and express my displeasure. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s even more difficult to actually contact the company (Valve owns Steam) than it was to sign up for an account. I had to sign up for a Support Account, because I guess my actual Steam account wasn’t good enough. More account names and passwords to remember, more hoop jumping, but at least this CAPTCHA actually worked the first time.
Then I finally get to the 200 word box where I can enter my “question”. My question: “How is it legal to extort money from your users?” I explained that my account had Limited Access, that I had spent hundreds of dollars in my son’s account and ended with a call to action: “Remove the Limited Access from my account”.
The Steam Customer Support was pretty quick to respond. They politely told me TFB, or more accurately they provided a link to their policy regarding this extortion. I responded by explaining that I knew they had policies, and asked them again to lift the Limited Access from my account. Again they responded quickly and told me that they’d already responded this my request, if I had a different issue they’d be happy to help. So, basically they pulled a Hilary Clinton and told me “I already explained it, it’s in my book” or policy in Steam’s case.
I’m considering my next move, I could email Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve and see if I get a resolution. He did say that earlier this year Valve had “pissed off the internet” garnering him 3,500 emails in 2 days for a business deal regarding Bethesda’s Skyrim game, so maybe he’d listen. Or Maybe I should send them a link to this post….
1 Comment