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Comment by MisterBiggs | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why Steam is in the headline as the cause when this is really on Sony. Adding region restrictions well after release was a terrible decision on their part and I think Steam being very lenient with refunds was the best they could do given the situation.

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Sony added region restrictions.

Valve is banning people for using VPNs.

This is on Valve.

What? Sony can ban Steam accounts (as in banned people can’t use their Steam accounts any more, not just in Sony games) and those banned by Steam should thank Steam for generous refund policy?

Edit: I have to reiterate: people are banned from accessing Steam games, not this one game or Sony games. The puzzling replies seemingly believing in the latter won’t stop coming.

> Sony can ban Steam accounts

Sony is not involved in Valve's decision to ban accounts for bypassing region restrictions, though they did contribute to the surge thanks to the bungling of the Helldivers 2/PSN situation. I suppose the question is should Valve be lenient to these customers considering the extenuating circumstances.

> Sony is not involved in Valve's decision

You don't know this.

There have been countless situations similar to this where license holders have demanded that platforms enforce restrictions. Especially in cases like this where you're dealing with countries that are under sanctions restrictions.

Point out a single instance where Valve has been caught banning accounts at the request of other businesses. Of course you're welcome to make all the wild speculations you'd like, but I'll stick to reasonable conclusions in the mean time.

Dota2 and Smurf accounts.

No different to as to using the VPN.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/valve-bans-90k-i-dota...

https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3692442542242977036

1. Dota is from Valve, not another publisher.

2. I see no mention of Steam account bans in either link. Don’t know if you have additional information supporting Steam bans.

Banning unwanted players from a game is fair game. Locking them out of every other purchase too? Highly questionable.

It is standard practice across the entertainment industry including video games.

Rights holders will demand that platforms enforce their restrictions. Which is exactly what Valve is doing.

Of course Valve has policies designed to meet the expectations of rights holders, that's a given and I'm unaware of any serious business on the planet selling goods created by other companies that doesn't have such policies and enforce them so they can continue to sell those goods. This is a blanket policy that Valve enforces regardless of the publisher.

Valve has been banning accounts for circumventing region restrictions for as long as the feature has existed, and long before Sony added their games to the platform. Just because these policies were designed to appease rights holders doesn't change the fact that it's at Valve's sole discretion to enforce compliance (at risk of losing publishers).

Let's be real here, there is no risk of losing publishers over not bending the knee to publishers over unreasonable demands (such as banning entire accounts). Publishers have been trying to stay off Steam for much more strategic reasons, and they have always come crawling back, admitting they fail at distributing games on their own. They would never seriously consider ditching the platform over petty grievances like this.

No Sony cannot ban Steam accounts. Only Valve can do that. And generally only does it for reasons like circumventing geo-blocks, malicious activities like spamming and scamming, excessive chargebacks.

Various types of community and game bans are up to developers, but those apply only to single game.

It begs the question: Is this the downfall of steam?

Why would it be? Gamers literally rush to defend the platform when competitors appears and they have effectively a captive audience as games aren’t portable to other launchers.

> Gamers literally rush to defend the platform

Could also be an effective paid PR team. Just because 'everyone' on the internet appears to have one opinion doesn't mean it's real.

Sure, but in this case the noise was loud enough and widespread enough that I suspect it wasn’t.

Everyone also have a good opinion on Steam IRL around me .

In my case I’m seating between two chairs. Steam is a good product, they have mostly respectable policies and I’m happy to "do business" with them but I can’t really forget that their DRM is everywhere, that I don’t own my games and that, say, Google also used to "not be evil".

I love Steam today but what will happen of my games collection when Valve’s infinite money printing machine will start to fail ?

This is why I generally tried to support physical games that are playable on release. But that is a losing battle. It’s still likely that I can drop in a brand new PS5 or Switch game and play it with no network connection, but I expect that to rapidly change in the next five years.

This is pretty much not possible on PC anymore outside of outliers.

No, even completely pulling out of Russia wouldn’t be the downfall of Steam. But I don’t know how this is related to my comment, which is response to a puzzling comment claiming that Steam has nothing to do with Steam account bans, and moreover people should be thankful for their leniency wrt refunds.

Banning some thousand Russian and Belarussian accounts? No.

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