This could be bigger than people realize. This is very common in many tech companies like Uber/Doordash/Sony/etc. where if you do a chargeback, you often get blacklisted on their service. It would be amazing if this starts to end this practice, and you can actually have authority to get your money back from your credit card and not be penalized by the service for it when they refuse to actually help.
It should really be a blanket rule against revoking access to previously purchased items in any form. If I get hacked and the perp buys something on my amazon account, I shouldn't lose access to music I've purchased etc.
And as someone else notes - this also is a problem with Google revoking your account (or losing access to it) and then losing access to other services that auth against Google single-sign-on.
Steam SOLD me a game. Amazon SOLD me an e-book. Shut down my account or refuse to do further business with me as you like, that's your right, but if you SOLD me something, you can't have it back. You need to either make it available to me or return my money. If Amazon wants to put the word "buy" on a button, then something needs to be sold. Otherwise the button needs to read "acquire revokable license" or something.
And, of course, this leads to the reason it'll never happen: first sale doctrine. If I own something, I need to be able to transfer it to someone else.
Ex. if access is revokable, it's illegal to use the word "Buy" alone - have to use "Rent" or "License" or "Buy License" or something that doesn't imply ownership (because ownership is not being offered)
They really ought to stop using "buy"/"purchase" metaphorically to mean something more like "one time fee for an indefinite lease that ends upon account termination." If they simply used a word better suited to the reality of the situation, then it wouldn't be a surprise that the account (which is a privilege, not a right) is a dependency of using what you paid for. Maybe something like "micro-upgrade [my account]."
Obviously eliminating that dependency is even better, but baby steps.
This behavior for smaller companies will likely result in fines from Visa, MasterCard and other cards. You really are supposed to treat charge-backs like you would losing an arbitration if you are a merchant. I've watched many a merchant do shady things around charge-backs and find out the hard way (I used to own an MSP, was enlightening). Most of the time it was trying to sue someone after losing, and then getting their case tossed because the judge treated the suit like they were reviewing an arbitration... and most of the time the merchants were actually in the wrong (as in selling defective goods, not delivering services or over-charging).
As far as I know, you won't actually lose your account if you perform a chargeback against Steam, but the account does get restricted in a number of ways, preventing further purchases, access to community features (including trading), multiplayer on VAT enabled serves, and more. The official documentation does not list the specific restrictions [0], but the (fairly old) screenshot in this thread does [1]. Moreover, the restrictions seem to temporary in some cases, even without the account holder reverting the charge-back [2]. Both sources are old, but I don't recall hearing of any changes in this regard, nor could I find anything in that vein.
[0] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2qa7fx/visa_has_char...
To be clear, I'm talking about a different case, where the customer doesn't reach out for help, and doesn't give you an opportunity to correct the problem (which most banks ask them to do first but they just lie about it). With my business, this is the case for 9 out of every 10 disputes (and I have a very low dispute rate). The other 1 time is they just mistakingly reported it as a dispute because they didn't recognize it, but after you reach out they correct it with their bank (but guess what, you still have to pay the dispute fee when that happens).
When your SAAS product costs $5 / month, and the dispute fees are $15 / dispute or more, and customers go back and file disputes on the previous X months of charges, and they never give you a chance to make it right, it becomes a problem worth banning them over.
You stop selling to them. You don’t need to ban their account to do that.
Their bank?
I doubt this would be applied to other companies unless they also found those companies used confusing UIs to get people to pay. Which is still good news nonetheless, as the main issue for me is all these dark patterns in the first place.
Similarly, no company that I chargeback against do I want to do business with anymore. A chargeback is a "burn the bridges" moment. You have tried everything reasonable, and the company is now defrauding you. Why on earth do you want to continue doing business with them?
You may have curated but you do not own your library. You purchased _access_ to said library.
Although, to be honest, if a problem has deteriorated to the point where I need to do a chargeback, I've already written off doing any further business with that company anyway.
They should be required to refund every purchase on an account that they close.
Though it would smell a bit like a giant squashing ants... anti-trust and all that. :/ So maybe government getting a handle on Dark Patterns is the best way to do things.
Yes, if they get enough people doing chargebacks. The challenge is most of these big co's seem to be in the "too big to punish" camp. This is both you need a large amount of chargebacks and perhaps they may not want to fire the companies (though this is speculative).
> At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs.
I'm with you that this is still important and valuable because many companies don't blacklist you. Furthermore I'd rather have that protection and testing a service which could be no service than no service at all.
It'd really very odd to see Americans insist that they should have the right to take a service, get the money back for it from the business i.e. get the service for free, and then go back and get service again! That's pretty unfair towards the business.
Presumably that's the end of the relationship - you claw your money back via the CC and say good bye to the company.
What's the argument for being able to charge back but then wanting to (and the company being forced to, as I think you are suggesting) doing business with each other?
I suspect I am missing something.
In this case, telling a private business they are forced to entertain customers who have robbed them, it's outrageous. And while I understand that chargebacks CAN be legitimate, they also CAN and often are illegitimate. When I worked in small business computer repair, we literally got out of the business of selling expensive machines because more than half of all orders were fraudulent and were charge backed with zero recourse -- we lose the machine, we lose the money. We lost an incredible sum of money to thieves this way, and so being told we are forced to do business with them would have destroyed our business.
If you wanted to create a new class of online public service like Twitter and Google and increase regulation on them as one might do hotels, that's one thing. But a blanket requirement that all businesses must entertain customers who chargeback is a nonstarter, imo.
If you are a business doing more normal business, selling something with no sort of required subscription, something the customer does not depend upon you for, then you are still free to stop doing business with them (minus a few cases related to protected classes).
I'm so happy to see authorities are finally doing something about this abuse.
They're completely draining to deal with, usually fraudulent, and the only way to win one is to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the buyer is lying.
On other side the companies should then be able to sue you and you need to prove that charge was fraudulent. If you fail, you will carry full costs of both sides. Thus cutting down the fraud by chargebacks.
Companies can sue you for false, damaging claims you make, or failure to complete your end of a contractual arrangement.
> and you need to prove that charge was fraudulent
Well, no, the initial burden of proof should remain on the entity seeking a remedy, but civil standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence) means that that initial burden is not hard to meet.
It's not relevant to Netflix.
Does Apple also do this?
When I told about my issue to ICO, they basically gave advice to use different service... that's it.
There should be some sort of legal protection that if you want to exercise your rights, company shouldn't be allowed to cut you out for doing so.
> Epic has never allowed users to cancel or undo charges for Battle Passes or Llamas and did not begin allowing users to cancel Cosmetics charges until June 2019. Even then, Epic uses design tricks, sometimes referred to as “dark patterns,” to deter consumers from cancelling or requesting refunds for unauthorized V-Bucks charges.
> On July 20, 2018, an Epic Community Coordinator asked if there were any plans to add a confirmation step for in-game purchases, noting: “This is actually a huge complaints on our side and could remove most of the ‘excuses’ about accidental purchase: ‘I wanted to press Replay, my PS4 was in sleep mode’, etc. This is something I wanted to push forward but didn’t have time to build a real case around, has this already been discussed in the past?”
> In addition, Epic deliberately requires consumers to find and navigate a difficult and lengthy path to request a refund through the Fortnite app. To start, Epic hid the link to submit a refund request under the “Settings” tab on the Fortnite app menu, far removed from the purchase screen, even though requesting a refund is not a game or device setting. The Epic user experience (“UX”) designer who helped design the refund request path reported that he put the link there in an “attempt to obfuscate the existence of the feature” and that “not a single player found this option in the most recent round of UX testing.” When the designer asked whether he should make the feature easier to find, he was told by a superior, “it is perfect where it is at.”
Many more examples in this complaint doc: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1923203EpicGame...
Also why steam is still the leader despite having a terrible UI: they have been very good to their customers.
Steams core customer is the game developers/publishers, who they take a ~30% (last time I checked) cut from the profits from.
The people who buy games are simply users of Steam, and Steam has to treat them well, otherwise their actual customers (developers/publishers) won't get as much profits, and indirectly Steam.
But in the "store" part of the app, where you're purchasing things with the "v-bucks" in-game currency (which you've paid actual money for), the purchase was just a single button press. It was very easy to accidentally purchase when instead you meant to press the "back" or "preview item" button. Only recently did they change this to use the same "hold for 1 second" pattern already used in the battle-pass.
yeah, it would have absolutely done that.
Too bad there aren’t punitive damages. Hopefully this action by the FTC chills other businesses that use dark patterns or ban users for charge backs. Not offering competent customer service is a liability not a cost savings.
I really wish more companies were required to still allow account access after disputing a credit card charge.
If a company doesn't want to deal with this hassle, don't offer up "Sign in with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever" (I'm talking about Google/Apple/FB/whatever in this scenario), and don't "sell" digital goods that are hosted online.
I can understand cutting off a bad actor from making more purchases, but reclaiming their already paid for stuff feels pretty evil.
We, as software engineers (or working in the field), have the power to not implement these features when our employer asks us to do it.
Everyday we read about organisations using dark patterns in their (software) products and then we come to HN to complain about it.
How did these features get built? By whom?
Yes, I realise not everyone has the privilege to say "NO", but at least some of us can and should push back.
Realize that you're statment is a euphemism. What you really mean is we have the choice between implementing a dark pattern or finding another job and letting someone else implement it. Stated this way it's a lot easier to understand people's behavior.
You incorrectly reduced the available options.
Here are a couple more options:
- convince your peers and supervisors why using dark patterns is trash
- just don't implement dark patterns and rather focus on useful features and bugfixes
- be loud about your distain of such request for dark pattern implementation and tweet, blog, write about it.
- ...
One could be tempted to think we're overpaid or have it too good as is, but we're basically lightning wizards making rocks think for us from sometimes thousands of miles away from where we physically are. When put that way it doesn't seem so farfetched to pay us a lot of money for our works.
s/implementing a dark pattern/performing any immoral or unethical act/g
The reality is that most of us think we're making the world a better place, when truthfully we're just trying to make a decent living, while making the unscrupulous shot callers rich. And that's the percentage that does actually want to make an honest living. Others will happily apply their knowledge to deceive and exploit, and then go on to make successful companies of their own. The circle of tech.
You don't, but, doctors and structural engineers do.
I was saying for years that a licensing proffeshional body, like the one other proffesions have, would improve things in our industry.
When was the last time a bridge fell down because someone boss bullied a structural engineer into suigning it off? They know you know that any engineer that agrees to do doggy shit is risking their licence, and it's not worth if for them.
This industry would improve significantly if it had a proffeshional body with teeth, and for that you need licensing like doctors and other proffeshions have.
Not necessarily that scenario, but this happens all the time. See the recent catastrophe in Turkey.
But I do agree that a tech license to uphold ethics makes sense. The problem is that the negative effects of tech aren't as clear-cut as from a bridge falling down. We still don't know what the long-term effects of social media are. Advertising rules all media, yet it's one of the most manipulative and harmful industries to have ever existed. These are not going anywhere because they have made many people very rich, and now these people have enormous influence over legislators and governments.
Speaking of legislators, they're hopelessly tech illiterate, and unprepared to regulate tech in any way. It took them decades to regulate industries that were literally killing people. How long do you think it will take for them to catch up to Big Tech?
I agree wholeheartedly. I would (and have) quit jobs where I was required to do things I considered unethical. Having to do that can suck and be a financial blow, but I think being able to keep my soul is worth it.
That's not the call to action. The call to action is to refuse to participate in unethical behavior.
Software developers should have a professional code of ethics. Other professions have them, why not computer scientists, computer engineers, and software developers? There is the ACM/IEEE-CS Software Engineering Code, but I don't know any professionals outside academia that remain ACM members, IEEE membership might remain relevant for computer engineers, so I may well be wrong in that regard.
Management can always find someone willing to behave un-ethically if they look.
Regulation and criminal liability tends to be the only way to eliminate shady business practices.
True, but that doesn't mean you should participate.
I think there are two things here -- refusing to participate in bad behavior is about maintaining your own humanity and holding true to your own ethical code. That it may not correct the company's behavior is irrelevant to this. The point is to not let the company corrupt you.
The other thing is how to correct the behavior of misbehaving companies. This is what you're addressing, and I think your conclusion is largely correct.
These are not mutually exclusive. Both are very important.
When I realised that I had a choice, I resigned.
Again, I do realise that I'm privileged and not everyone can afford to simply resign, but a lot of us can and we, the ones who can, have no excuse.
We are the "new" crack dealers
2Pac - Changes
You gotta operate the easy way
- I made a G today
but you made it in a sleazy way
Sellin' crack to the kids
- I gotta get paid
Well hey, well, that's the way it isI don’t love the “v bucks” vs real dollars they charge for things. though I get that the reward for those who grind isn’t actual dollars.
As someone who let a younger person play on my laptop, I will note my balance was quickly brought down to 0 though I had some new “emotes”.. lesson learned.
I’d rather just pay once for games, though that seems to be on its way out.
Unfortunately the only way to fight that is to not pay for anything else, but companies also know that's where the money's at.
I paid $40 for Overwatch. ActiBlizzard replaced what I paid for with F2P "Overwatch 2" and added "battle passes" and overpriced skins, and they seem to be going that way permanently now.
That is, I don't have access to Overwatch, the product I paid full price for, anymore. And the PvE content they marketed Overwatch 2 as still hasn't materialized either.
I didn't even enter a credit card at all for a few years, and once I did decide to buy in, there was a full checkout process. Even after they had my card info, there was no ambiguity when I was buying something.
I do understand that might be different on consoles though, since consoles have such a constrained and clunky UI compared to a PC. That seemed to be what the main complaint was getting at - apparently on consoles the 'view skin from your locker' button that you use to take a look at it is the same button used to one-click buy one from the shop? That certainly does sound like a dark pattern!
As for 'v-bucks', which aren't real money, I don't mind them. If you do stuff in-game you get tons of free v-bucks. I bought the battle pass once a couple years ago and it's been free ever since then, because doing the quests gives you enough v-bucks to buy the next one and, over time, enough free v-bucks for some skins too. Again if you get the battle pass once and play it, you'll end up with tons of free skins too. And they're all just cosmetic.
And sure, I'd generally rather just pay once for many games, but I think Fortnite actually does quite a good job when it comes to justifying paying more than once.
Every season there are new maps, new characters, new mechanics, sometimes whole new game modes. It really does keep the game fresh and fun. And keeps the player base coming back for years so there are always people to match against.
The "pay once and then that's all there will ever be" model very often sees a quick short life for online activity. Before long only a few die-hards are still around trying to find others to play with. And then the company shuts down the servers. Being able to self-host servers can help a small game live longer. But a game that requires 100 players per match? It would probably be a wasteland in a few months once the initial mass got bored.
If memory serves Klei might have a solution for this but I haven’t bought anything on steam in some time so I may be thinking of some other game.
Because Apple charges 30%. And Apple can keep that if there is a refund.
In this case, Epic is returning money. They would ideally be net zero on this whole debacle. You mistakenly bought $10 worth of skins, Epic collected that $10. Then you get refunded $10, Epic returns that $10. In the App Store scenario. You mistakenly bought $10 worth of skins, Apple collected that $10, gave $7 to Epic. Then you get refunded $10, Apple returns that $10, and then collects that $10 from Epic. Epic loses $3 on the exchange.
And if this is just refunding the purchases, it's kind of a good deal for Epic. As they essentially got an interest free loan from their customers.
Just a minor note: I believe credit card transaction fees are not refunded to the vendor, so there is still a non-zero cost to refunding customers which likely doesn't make it a "good deal".
(Disclaimer: It's been over a decade since I did anything related to payments, so this may be out of date, or I may be misremembering it.)
Definitely a win for the little guy. /s
No one wants to pay for games anymore, no one wants a pay to win system in a game, and cosmetic items seem like a waste of money to most. The result is the gaming industry pulling out all the tricks to try to separate the consume from his or her wallet to pay for content.
The video game industry is exceedingly profitable. It makes more money than the movie industry, at nearly $100 billion per year.
I don't think it's struggling to monetize. It seems quite successful at that.
Is that true, or are games so broken that nobody is willing to pay for them anymore. I've completely stopped buying almost any game that isn't on Apple Arcade because I know those games will be free of pay-to-win mechanics and nickel-and-diming you with more charges and dark patterns. On Apple's service, they all have to ask if they want to steal my data and resell it. I always say "No." I have a Steam account for playing older games I bought a while ago, but I buy maybe 1 game per year on it, if even, and only because it's not available anywhere else I'm willing to spend money. I'm playing more games than ever before now, too!
Isn't it funny how they $h!t on Apple/Google gate keeping practices? Is this a part of Project Liberty to bypass stores and scam users?
Google and Apple take insane cuts out of any money moving on their platform and while Epic uses predatory tactics to trap people into subscriptions Apple and Google do the same.
One reason I don't begrudge them their 30% is that I could easily lose that much or more trying to get some vendors to cancel subscriptions if I didn't have the easy options Apple provides. Epic is clearly one of them.
To his credit he came straight to me and told me he got all of the items “for free”.
After a huge muck around I finally got a refund (dealing with a combination of Nintendo and Epic) but the outcome was that I could no longer use a credit card to make purchase on my account ever again.
They’ve known for a long long time that accidental purchases happen and avoided having a decent path to refund (up until somewhat recently according to TFA) so I’m glad they’re being slapped with regulations.
Mobile games are so filled with this junk I don't even bother looking at them any more.
I avoid anything on PC that has a store, repeating season passes or virtual currency of any kind. It's even coloured my view of the types of add-on DLC that 20 years ago would have been a legitimate expansion pack, purely because it feels too similar to the dark patterns used in stores.
I refuse to give money to the companies that push these financial cons on people.
I find the acceptance of in-game stores rather unfathomable, but apparently the market has spoken as it represents the majority of industry revenue. So, it's unfortunately not going anywhere. What's wrong with players willing to drop $1000+ on a single game and/or have their game mechanics and other activities tainted by constantly pulling out their wallet? I know people in RL that do this, some to great personal financial harm, and haven't really gotten a good answer yet.
My biggest beef is when this is added in an update after I bought a game that didn't have it.
Either way I'm with all of the above comments, the mere intermingling of real world cash concerns with a game ruins the immersion for me. I have made a few exceptions to this rule where I think it's really warranted due to the quality of the game or people involved, but overall I hate this direction.
I have a hard time finishing games. When they add new chapters to the game they’ve moved the goal posts as it were, and that doesn’t feel good. If they introduce some new side quests and a new race, I’ve still finished the game (or let’s be honest, got 90% of the way).
But if I want to play Skyrim again as a telekinetic khajiit then I might pay for DLC.
You must be new to Bethesda games. You buy the "game of the year edition" with all DLC included when it's on 70% discount. You don't buy at launch :)
For example. Dirt Rally 2 honestly feels like a complete scam. The base game comes with 6 rally locations (not counting some rally cross tracks). And there are 7 more available as DLC. The base game feels intentionally slimmed down to make you feel you need to buy the DLC. it pads in extra junk content to make it seem long without actually having much there (like for example the rally cross tournaments make you compete in about 6 rounds of heats on the same short track to make it seem like there are lots of events, but in any other game all the rally cross tracks would have been a single event with perhaps one qualifier and one final on each track). Lots of the daily challenge type activities use the DLCs so are unavailable if you don't by them. All the locations are listed in the menus along with the not-included ones with just a small "DLC" flag across a corner. In addition there are perhaps dozens of cars available as DLC. And several very unclear things like the "flat out pack" which incorporates some of the other DLCs It very much feels like they've taken one game, a split it up into small parts to make you pay more for what would have been one purchase in the 90s. And the multiple small packs with overlapping content seem designed to make you accidentally pay more or buy the same thing twice through confusion. I completely refuse to engage with this and despite being a bit fan of rally games I won't touch this DLC, and tbh if I'd known the game was like this I wouldn't have even touched the base game.
On the other hand, Mario Kart 8 on switch comes with 12 "cups" each with 4 unique tracks, so 48 tracks in total. They have a single DLC which adds a further 12 cups and 48 more tracks for £22. (About half the price of the base game). 48 tracks in the base game feels substantial, I was happy with the game and didn't feel short changed. And the DLC that doubles the number of tracks also feels worth it without being a scam. But I have to be honest, because of the scammy nature of the rest of the business my default stance is to avoid DLCs so it was a while before I purchased this one, despite it being on the better end of the spectrum.
So there's a good way and a. And way to do DLC. But the bad way is poisening the whole market and putting me off considering the DLCs that are done well.
Both Epic and Apple are right on some issues, and horrifically wrong on others.
Loudly positioning themselves as pro-consumer makes this look more hypocritical than it would have otherwise.
The fact that I do not really own the games is a huge pain in my ass, but I love video games, and want to spend my actual money on them, so I'm kind of stuck.
Where do people get ideas like this?
There are more examples here about the patterns https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...
They already changed the system like half a year ago, guess they knew about the penalty back then https://www.fortnite.com/news/updates-to-fortnite-purchase-c...
Now for every purchase you have to hold the buy button for several seconds. You can't click/touch accidentally. Plus there is a proper refund system now.
But at least they don’t auto play movies that you have to pay for. Which it sounds like is what’s happening here.
So this line from the linked ftc post is incorrect:
"Epic charges for in-game purchases designed to enhance game play"
Money does not enhance game play.
Epic also hands out in-game currency every so often, so you can even collect skins for free after some time.
That said, kids gotta have the new skins.
What? Were these just five people who happened to be in the room? How do you receive only 5 comments?
Why do these penalties always end up as a fine for the company? They should also be forced to simply go and refund the amount they overcharged at least and preferably add a multiple too.
If your customers are just buying a limited license to use a digital product until cancelled at the whim of the company then make that 100% up-front obvious. And adjust the prices accordingly.
At least on my iPhone even if an app doesn't ask for confirmation before a purchase, Apple Pay shows a confirmation dialog that requires Touch ID.
Are there mobile flows that don't require a confirmation dialog by the payment service itself (in my case, Apple Pay)?
Or is this mainly about platforms outside of mobile, like PC games where Epic itself has your credit card or something?