On Apr 8th I purchased Elite Dangerous Odyssey which failed to work properly.
I reached out thru Steam Support and requested a refund for a total of 59.39.
Steam refused the refund stating that over 3000 hours were accumulated on the DLC,
which is not correct. That 3000 hours is for the main game Elite Dangerous. I then submitted
a second ticket, and got the same canned response, even though in the second ticket to steam I
had explained that there is an error with the actual hours on the game purchased.
Both times, the refund was refused.
I then filed a dispute with Paypal, and Valve was given until Aug. 2nd to reply.
No reply was given, and Paypal ruled in my favor.
The following day my Steam Account was locked and a message from Steam stating that due to the charge back
my account would be locked until the charge back was reversed. Steam also claims this is a "fraudulent" chargeback.
I am going to clarify this for everyone to see:
1. Tickets submitted for refund to support at steam, 2 total, were refused due to incorrectly allocated game time
for a product that is separate from the main game. (DLC)
2. Only when the same "canned response" was given a second time, did I dispute the charge. A piece of software that
doesn't work is by definition a product that is "not as advertised".
3. Valve was given from the time of dispute to Aug. 2nd to respond and did not.
4. Valve immediately locks customer's account and payment method to avoid further chargebacks, and tells customer in order to restore functionality to the account the customer MUST reverse the fraudulent charge back. THIS WAS NOT A FRAUDULENT CHARGEBACK.
5. Multiple support tickets are sent afterwards attempting to explain the issue in the hopes to unban the Paypal account on file.
Each reply stated that the Paypal account would be banned unless the chargeback was reversed.
This is poor customer service on Steam/Valve's part. No effort was made to actually understand the reasoning behind a consumer protecting themselves.
Furthermore, if I didn't contact Paypal, and let Steam/Valve keep the cost of the DLC, Steam would have been committing fraud, and it appears they are fine with that.
I have filed an escalation to this as an attempt to protect other Steam members from the same issue, and also in the hopes that Valve will look further into this matter and realize where their support went wrong and make changes to their support model, which in it's current state needs revised.
What's even more disturbing is that one of the largest Game platforms for PC is conducting unethical business practices by asking their consumer to reverse a chargeback for a defective product in order to regain access to their account.
Buyers BEWARE
