News Valve pulls Earth: Year 2066 and offers refund

I am glad steam has finally got some quality control. Still not happy with their customer service support. I can't believe they have gotten away with no proper customer support for so long. Imagine if you couldn't ring up sainsbury's or Debenhams if there was a problem.

 

Their Customer Support really does need to be improved. You can still spend days waiting for problems to be responded to, even Account problems (that are a priority) you still end up waiting days (Shortest response time for me was 5 days, still took a further 2 weeks to resolve).

They really have to step up their game with removing these shoddy games, even some supposedly AAA titles that have come out in the past few years deserve to be pulled *cough*Colonial Marines*cough* for this kind of bull aswell.

There's also now the story of the Pantheon kickstarter game where the boss decided to take a huge chunk of cash out of the fundraised capital. Scumbags everywhere nowadays

 

Shame because this is one of my favourite games ever released and the dev is really cool.






Last edited by Muxwell; 5 minutes ago

 

Steam should also be doing this with AAA games when they don't deliver on what was promised and don't have any of the features that the developers promised.

But hey atleast they are making sure the smaller companies get punished for doing what the big companies don't get punished for.

 

Seeing as Origin already does this, Steam really should be better at refunds. EA's AAA games can be refunded for any reason at all.

 

lol this made my morning.



Anyway, I'm just curious how Valve's support is so bad? I've never needed them for anything which is why I'm asking.

 

DLDeadbolt - the problem with pantheon was when kickstarter failed - that money is given back , its when they went crowdfunding without the safety net that's when It went wrong

 

Apart from waiting days/weeks for replies to tickets, they like to use generic messages to fob you off without helping.

If they had a decent Chat/IM support like EA (dear god I'm praising EA for something) it would help with their supposed backlog, and would deal with a lot of the more serious/immediate problems that arise (Account hijacking, etc)

 

They don't have a call center. Also their version of customer support is, we will refund you 1 game and thats it. My friend got overcharged for a game once, they did bugger all.

 

I kind of almost sort of get the lack of call center for Valve/Steam, but at the same time, the turn around is WAYYYYY too long on a lot of issues. I haven't needed them much, thankfully, but the couple of times I did the minimum wait time was 24hrs and once with an account lockout (because I couldn't get the activation email, dang you hotmail!) it took roughly 4 days to get my account access restored, which put me 1 day past when one of the big steam sales was going on (and oh, by the way, I couldn't play any steam games for 4 days too, which was annoying).

Its part of the reason why I avoid buying anything that requires ANY kind of online service to work. Steam/Valve are pretty decent, IMHO, but the fact that it can take days sometimes (I know people who waited roughly 7-8 days during peak times to get account issues resolved) to get something resolved is too long.

It should take no more than 24hrs unless there is action needed on the customers part/back and forth communication required.

PS this doesn't mean I don't have ANY games that require steam, but steam is about the only one I am even mildly willing to use (will not use Origin or others) and frankly there are games I've just skipped over because I saw they required steam and just didn't feel like it was worth any potential hassel. I think I have all of 6 or maybe 7 games that require steam.

 

Steam is pretty reasonable, I think. The vast majority of games only require first-time run online for authorization, and after that, you can play the games offline all you want. I find that acceptable.

 

Yeah, but you need to login still and if you mess-up your account...

I am willing to put up with Steam for the small number of games I feel I really, really want, but I am not not exactly in love with it. I'll grant my only real issue is with the slow customer service, but it has bitten me a couple of times, badly once (computer reinstall, only machine with steam loaded I couldn't get it activated because as hotmail kept dropping the steam guard activation emails and then Steam customer support took about 4 1/2ish days to finally unlock the account).