If you decide you don’t want your purchased Steam, Xbox Live or Apple iOS game anymore, or if it doesn’t work as promised or at all, what rights do you have legally? I get such questions a LOT. While there is a body of law about this area of consumer protection, sadly there is little in… Continue reading Australia, Steam and consumer legal rights in video games
Tag: Valve
Non-story: are Valve and Microsoft breaching competition law? (Answer: No)
There’s been a lot of commentary about competition law (or antitrust law, as it’s known in the USA) and the games industry over the last week or so, focusing in particular on Valve and Microsoft. This is a post to explain why that’s a non-story.
Blizzard, Valve and the future of virtual goods
This is a long(ish) post about some moves that Blizzard and Valve have recently announced regarding Diablo 3 and Steam respectively, and what they mean for the future of virtual goods in games. Here’s the short version for lazy sods:
Blizzard to contest Valve’s DOTA trademark application?
I wrote earlier this month about the Legal Battle Brewing Over DOTA, a popular free to play Warcraft 3 mod which Valve is now planning to revamp and release commercially. I said in that post that I think the fact that the DOTA IP is split across multiple developers means that we will see legal… Continue reading Blizzard to contest Valve’s DOTA trademark application?
Opinion: the legal fight brewing over DOTA 2
UPDATE: Now Blizzard have begun to get involved a little more actively in the DOTA matter, which raises the stakes on the trademark front – see more from me on that here. So, Valve announced DOTA 2 yesterday. This is of course a sequel (of sorts) to the wildly popular Warcraft III custom map, Defense of the… Continue reading Opinion: the legal fight brewing over DOTA 2
News: Australia vs L4D2: Part 2
Another twist in the battle between Valve, Australia’s game classification board and the countless thousands of zombies which comprise Left 4 Dead 2 (see our first blog entry on this farce here; thanks for the update on this story are due to Slashdot). It seems that Valve has prepared a “compromise” version of L4D2 with which the Australian game… Continue reading News: Australia vs L4D2: Part 2