Valve Won’t Allow You to Sue Them in a Class-Action Lawsuit Anymore

As it’s become so popular for companies to do as of late, Valve has decided to make alterations to its terms of service that attempt to prohibit the use of class-action lawsuits by its customers against the company.

Here, in Valve’s words, is the reasoning behind the decision:

“Most significant to the new dispute resolution terms is that customers may now only bring individual claims, not class action claims. We considered this change very carefully. It’s clear to us that in some situations, class actions have real benefits to customers.

In far too many cases however, class actions don’t provide any real benefit to users and instead impose unnecessary expense and delay, and are often designed to benefit the class action lawyers who craft and litigate these claims. We think this new dispute resolution process is faster and better for you and Valve while avoiding unnecessary costs, and that it will therefore benefit the community as a whole.”

It should be clarified that this does not mean you (or any other customer with an applicable issue) couldn’t take Valve to court over a problem, it simply means that you and a handful of others can’t do it all together.

The most publicized example of this was the class-action suit regarding Sony and the PlayStation Network outage of 2011, where much madness occurred.

Other companies that have crafted similar alterations to their service terms include none other than Sony, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts.