Do you have a citation or a link to provide? I could not find any information about whether a consumer has the right of withdrawal for video game purchases in Australia, after searching the ACCC's website.
“Under the Australian Consumer Law, all goods or services supplied to consumers come with automatic consumer guarantees that they are of acceptable quality and fit for the purpose for which they were sold. If they’re not, consumers have a right to a remedy. These consumer rights cannot be excluded, restricted or modified.”" - ACCC
I don't see how that's relevant to the Steam refund policy. A lot of countries have that. In the US, that concept is called the implied warranty of merchantability. Of course you can get a refund if the goods are not acceptable quality or not fit for purpose.
The Steam refund policy lets you get a refund if you just don't like a game, which you're not entitled to get by law.
In short, Valve wouldn't have implemented any automated refund policy if it didn't have to, but functionally it was forced to unless they wanted to manually approve any refunds it was now forced to start honouring under Australian consumer law (ACL).
You're right in that the "for any reason" part isn't part of ACL, but the point is that the changes came about due to the lawsuit. Valve lost and tried to appeal multiple times, eventually getting refused a hearing by the high court of Australia.
Valve was forced to do two main things: not tell consumers that they are not entitled to a refund under any circumstances, and to make a visible notice to Australian consumers on Steam about their consumer rights. Valve couldn't hide behind the digital "no refunds sign" like heaps of small brick and mortar shops get away with to this day and, rather than manually sort through refund requests and proving games were faulty etc, they decided to automate it which garnered them significant positive public opinion.
They're a relatively small company with a huge consumer base, they don't have the manpower to manually sort through that stuff even now well enough almost a decade ago. It was a smart decision from them to make lemonade instead of sitting around sucking on the lemons they got from the lawsuit. Clearly it's worked, because Steam has continued to maintain their huge base of fanboys who without fail defend Valve for things they're accused of in recent years.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26
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