Valve Corporation, tired of paying arbitration fees, has removed a mandatory arbitration clause from Steam’s subscriber agreement. Valve told gamers in yesterday’s update that they must sue the company in order to resolve disputes.
The subscriber agreement includes “changes to how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved,” Steam wrote in an email to users. “The updated dispute resolution provisions are in Section 10 and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration. We’ve also removed the class action waiver and cost and fee-shifting provisions.”
Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn’t just say “come sue us” if they weren’t wholly confident that they weren’t about to be losing any cases any time soon.
This isn’t some huge “win” for the people; gamers aren’t gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam’s userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.