Automated systems will never be perfect but there are companies that have policies that are far more respectful of their customers than others.
If you get detected for fraud or did a chargeback on steam, you will be issued a trade ban and a ban on buying games and activating game codes, but valve does NOT take away your ability to download and play the games you already own and legitimately bought in the past. Heck, in the case of chargebacks they can be quite lenient : it can be a temporary restriction on buying that is lifted after a few months (but with a permanent ban on the specific visa card).
If you do something wrong with the community features, your account will become a restricted account and you will not be able to use them anymore, but you will still be able to play your games too.
They also have an actually active online customer support service that help you regain control of your account if there was a fault on their part or something else, like someone hacking your account, and it doesn't require an obscure method like mailing some gabenewell@valve.something to get things done.
What Apple and Google does with their account system should be illegal. It's asinine that society would accept that one could lose thousands of $ of software and media bought because for reason X or Y they banned your account.
Valve can do very granular account restrictions, there's no reason why the wealthiest companies in the world can't.
And this is why I have a humongous library of games on steam and will never spend a single $ on Google Play or the App Store. Concentrating all sorts of digital purchases onto a single point of failure in the hands of companies that treat you like garbage? I think not.
Automated systems will never be perfect but there are companies that have policies that are far more respectful of their customers than others.
If you get detected for fraud or did a chargeback on steam, you will be issued a trade ban and a ban on buying games and activating game codes, but valve does NOT take away your ability to download and play the games you already own and legitimately bought in the past. Heck, in the case of chargebacks they can be quite lenient : it can be a temporary restriction on buying that is lifted after a few months (but with a permanent ban on the specific visa card).
If you do something wrong with the community features, your account will become a restricted account and you will not be able to use them anymore, but you will still be able to play your games too.
They also have an actually active online customer support service that help you regain control of your account if there was a fault on their part or something else, like someone hacking your account, and it doesn't require an obscure method like mailing some gabenewell@valve.something to get things done.
What Apple and Google does with their account system should be illegal. It's asinine that society would accept that one could lose thousands of $ of software and media bought because for reason X or Y they banned your account.
Valve can do very granular account restrictions, there's no reason why the wealthiest companies in the world can't.
And this is why I have a humongous library of games on steam and will never spend a single $ on Google Play or the App Store. Concentrating all sorts of digital purchases onto a single point of failure in the hands of companies that treat you like garbage? I think not.