What you need to explain is how Justin over here was supposed to be aware of this and how it's his fault that he's out £40 or whatever with no explanation or understanding why and how that is in any way a positive or even neutral situation for him as a consumer. Because if you can't, that would be "anti-consumer" in a nutshell. The shitty policies and politics involved behind his loss of funds, the ones you are trying to use to explain why it's not wrong, are the exact reasons why the debated phrase was created!
Yes, to be fair, resellers do their best to dress up their sites to make it appear as though they're affiliated with the publishers in question, but again Valve's take on retail key revokes is not a "shitty policy". The key was revoked because
all the proof of purchase material resides at the reseller's end. Saying "Here's my PayPal transaction to Simply CD Keys" doesn't help at all when the reseller submitted a duplicate key ticket under the account name of xxXLuvsBoobsXxx -- how, exactly, is Valve supposed to ascertain that the key was transferred via transaction as opposed to simply stolen and resold by a different party? This is why Valve sides with the party with the most pertinent proof and, most importantly, the semblance of doubt is why disputed keys can't be reused.
Thanks aku, you put it better than I could. It really annoys me that people defend anti-consumer polices because a company puts them in their T&C's no matter how bad they are for us. Just because someone says something doesn't make it right and I have no idea why anyone of the general public defends it. As it stands I have to agree to everything they say or I can't play my games but that should not make it OK and I wish we could all get behind a move to change things.
This is something I've disagreed with ever since Steam launched and something I've emphatically opposed since Valve stopped banning/locking out accounts in favour of restricting functionality instead. There is absolutely zero justification for disagreeing with the SSA precluding a user from accessing their
pre-existing library, but as I said in a recent thread it's been close to two years since the SSA was updated and so it's entirely possible that Valve has changed its tune. Time will tell.
Edit: And just for good measure:
Hey, I wasn't trying to be a grammar nazi ...
I was joking, by the way: you can't sue me because I did nothing illegal. I thought that would've been obvious considering the context.
I edited my post to make this clear but you had quoted it beforehand.
You're not the only one to use that word in regards to this ...
You misunderstand: I'm acutely aware of the implications of the term. I was typing on auto-pilot and used the wrong word. What I'd intended to get at is that since no authorised transaction took place, neither the platform holder nor publisher is under any legal obligation to assist -- and just to avoid someone using this as a consumerism launch pad, no, I'm not arguing that this is "right", morally speaking.
