Meet me in court: Steam has changed its user dispute resolution policy

Valve has updated the Steam Subscriber Agreement (SSA) to no longer require Steam users living outside the UK and EU to resolve disputes through binding arbitration. Now all disputes that arise must be considered in court.

Image source: Steam

«We continue to recommend that you resolve issues through Steam Support – in most cases this is the best option. If it was not possible to find a solution, under the terms of the updated agreement, any disputes should be resolved in court, and not through arbitration, the service reports in a message to users. “We have also removed the anti-class action and cost-sharing and fee-sharing provisions contained in previous versions of the agreement.”

According to PC Gamer, the rejection of forced arbitration as a method of resolving disputes was due to “arbitration overload.”

Back in 2020, Comcast and AT&T ran into trouble when several lawyers discovered that, as an alternative to class actions, people forced to resolve a dispute through forced arbitration could simply band together and file all their arbitration requests at once. As the New York Times noted at the time, “many companies are struggling to keep up.” It was a kind of DDoS attack that stopped the work of arbitration authorities.

This has led to DoorDash, for example, having to pay millions of dollars in bills after receiving 6,000 claims. And Valve itself also suffered from such arbitration proceedings. According to Reuters, late last year Valve sued small law firm Zaiger, which alleged “antitrust violations on behalf of more than 50,000 customers of Valve’s Steam game distribution platform.”