Microsoft Follows Valve Down The Road Of Refunds On Digital Game Purchases
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With Steam's policy for providing refunds on digital game purchases being roughly two years old, many people forget the context of the time when Valve began offering those refunds. It's worth being reminded that at that time nobody in the neighborhood of the Steam client's popularity was offering any real avenue for getting refunds on digital game purchases. Those that did mostly did so under the most restrictive conditions, with insane single-digit day windows in which a refund could be had, and only for certain reasons, of which the game being shitty was not included. Steam's criteria was that you could request a refund during a two-week period for any reason, be it the game not living up to expectations, the gamer's machine not being able to run it properly, or anything else. The other contextual aspect to keep in mind was that Steam had endured several weeks of absolutely brutal PR, with awful customer service ratings and the whole fiasco over its attempt at creating a paid-mod system.Still, Valve broke the mold in some respects with the new policy, forcing the competition to keep up. It took two years, but Microsoft recently announced that both its Xbox and Windows 10 marketplaces will likewise offer refunds on digital purchases, with the same fourteen-day window and the same requirement that the game not have been played for more than two hours.Microsoft's self-service refunds work much like returns do on PC game-download service Steam. Shoppers have up to 14 days after purchasing a game or app to request a refund, and that will only work if the software in question has not been used for more than two hours while owned. Similar to Steam, Xbox and Windows 10 users will have to navigate to an "order history" section of their account to request such a refund, rather than any obvious tabs or buttons within a given game or app's landing page. However, this can only be done through a Web browser pointed to account.microsoft.com, as opposed to the Xbox One or Windows Store dashboards. It's Microsoft, so of course it would have to be more complicated than it should be, but this is still a good and important step. For far too long, digital purchases for all kinds of goods -- video games included -- were viewed as somehow different from a consumer rights standpoint than a physical product. This sense of difference propagates itself in many directions, but the ability to get refunds on products was certainly one of them. It's far past time that the fake wall that's been erected between digital goods in terms of consumer rights had some bricks pulled from it, and these refund policies are a good start.They also serve to show how the competition will respond when one company begins treating its customers well, which is essentially to play follow the leader. You can bet that all eyes are now on the PlayStation Network to see exactly how long it will take for Sony to keep up with the competition.
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posted at: 12:00am on 19-Apr-2017
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Arizona Governor Signs Asset Forfeiture Reform Bill Into Law, Raising Evidentiary Burden For Law Enforcement
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Some more forward progress has been made against civil asset forfeiture, this time in Arizona. Governor Doug Ducey put his signature on a reform bill late last week, raising the evidentiary bar for seizures in the state.House Bill 2477 restricts police and prosecutors from abusing the civil forfeiture process by requiring them to show “clear and convincing evidence” that certain property was linked to a crime before the seizure or forfeiture of any assets. Under current law, prosecutors are only required to show a “preponderance” of the evidence.The move drew bipartisan support from nearly all members of the Legislature, with only one vote lodged against the measure. While it doesn't go so far as to establish a conviction requirement, it does make it a little more difficult for law enforcement agencies to walk off with citizens' possessions. Unfortunately, not much has been done to address the terrible recourse process, which dumps the burden of proof back on the citizen whose possessions have been taken.Navigating this particular legal thicket often requires a lawyer and there's a good chance the best possible outcome will be a partial release of the property seized. Fortunately, going the lawsuit route will be a little less risky in the future: the new law also ensures legal fees will be awarded to winning parties who manage to litigate the return of seized property.Even if Governor Ducey had been opposed to the reform bill, he wouldn't have been able to defend a veto in the same way Idaho Governor Butch Otter did when shooting down a popular reform effort there. There's plenty of evidence the state's asset forfeiture laws have been abused.After analyzing more than 1,300 quarterly financial reports filed by agencies detailing seizures and expenditures from fiscal years 2011 through 2015, AZCIR found that the state commission tasked with compiling statewide civil asset forfeiture figures omitted roughly $20 million, or 16 percent of overall spending, from its reports.[...]And when it comes to tracking what law enforcement agencies are seizing and from whom, virtually no data is available other than aggregate totals of the amounts seized. Along with zero transparency and questionable accounting, there are a few small law enforcement agencies where seizing stuff is basically all they do.[S]anta Cruz County [...] agencies seized more than $5 million during the past five years. All but $90 came from auctioning forfeited property, such as cars and houses. Considering the total, along with the small population, the county also had the highest seizure rate – more than three times the state average.Agencies in La Paz County, with a population of 20,500, seized $1.6 million during the past five years, the second highest rate in the state – $955,000 of that in 2015 alone. In Arizona, law enforcement agencies are allowed to spend seized funds directly on employee salaries, which has led to this sort of thing being common:The Attorney General’s Office spent more on personnel than any other agency at $6.4 million, which funded 50 positions, according to an August 2016 budget proposal document provided to AZCIR. When your paycheck depends directly on successful seizures, there's no way you won't be performing as many seizures as possible.This new law doesn't make dramatic changes to existing forfeiture statutes, but any chance, no matter how small, always appears to be unacceptable to the agencies affected. Here's Chief Deputy (Mohave County Attorney's Office) James Schoppman's reaction:In a letter to the governor pleading the county’s case, Schoppmann wrote, “If HB 2477 is enacted, Mohave County will suffer because of an overreaction to the misdeeds of a very small percentage of others and the result will be a net loss to our community and a net gain for drug traffickers.” Apparently, it's a net win for the community when criminals go free but their money goes to pay DA's office salaries. The statement is complete crap. Arizona law enforcement agencies are handfuls of cash from hundreds of victims and doing almost nothing to make a dent in drug cartel operations. This systemic abuse won't be stopped by the new law, but it will be slowed. Arizona law enforcement will just have to exercise a bit more discretion when separating citizens from their property.
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