The company says users can fend for themselves

Jun 30, 2015 08:35 GMT  ·  By

The team at Valve in charge of the Steam digital distribution system is announcing that it no longer plans to offer compensation for those who are victims of item trade scams because they should be able to protect themselves from such situations when using the service.

The official Frequently Asked Questions section on the support site has been updated to explain that the company is offering enough details on its site to help gamers make good decisions and avoid all scams.

Valve adds, "Our community assigns an item a value that is at least partially determined by that item’s scarcity. If more copies of the item are added to the economy through inventory rollbacks, the value of every other instance of that item would be reduced."

Trading on Steam has taken off since the company has introduced the new badge and card system, and there are a lot of users who are trying to take advantage of their peers.

It seems that the number of scams has decreased enough that Valve believes users can now deal with them on their own.

Users might be unhappy with the changes

The team at Valve might be right about the amount of information that it delivers for gamers and about how easy it is to deal with scam attempts.

But it's unlikely that all gamers will read all the details in the FAQ, and there's a good chance that a part of the Steam user community will be unhappy with the inability to ask for compensation.

It's possible that the new announcement from Valve will cancel out all the goodwill that the company generated when it revealed that it was offering refunds for all video games that it sold, as long as gamers asked for them without playing more than two hours.

At the moment, the Steam universe is on the verge of a major expansion, with the launch of the new machines from its hardware partners and the introduction of the new specialized controller in the fall.

Valve is also planning to deliver its Vive virtual reality solution, which is being created in collaboration with HTC.