Steam, banning players for being generous?

Antari

Music Slave
Nov 4, 2009
2,246
0
0
Sgt. Sykes said:
Antari said:
You are a private citizen. They are a business. They have to follow much stricter laws concerning importing and exporting.

The games are activated on steam, accessed from the EU to the USA through steam. Even if he exported them, the governments see Steam as the exporter because it realistically owns the product as per the EULA.

In this case, Gifts. Most private citizen tax laws allow gifts up to a certain value, or within a reasonable classification of gift or inheritance. In this case he was "gifting" games to around 20 people, on a regular basis, that'll add up quickly (average out how many steam games you and your friends own). Not just during holidays and birthdays. When Steam submits its tax information to the EU at the end of it all, the EU will see that its more than a simple "gift" arrangement. Because either way both parts of the transaction are on Steam's records, regardless of what payment method was used. At that point the EU would no longer allow them to be classified as Gifts, and tax them.
Actually until I went out of business at the end of last year, I was a business and I dealt with customs a lot of times.

Anyway, you're right that the fact that Valve officially 'owns' those games complicates matters a little, but actually not really. Valve has sold those games to a US citizen; they don't need to care one bit about what he done with them. Valve can easily prove who they sold the goods to, who they received the payment from and that they pay the taxes from these sales to the US government (because it's no export). Valve is legally out of this.

Also, their EULA doesn't affect the matter of international taxes - they may still 'own' the property per EULA, but they still made the sale to the US citizen and that US citizen made a sale to a EU citizen.

The only people who should deal with taxes are the people who received those gifts (the buyers in the EU) and that's only if the summary of any one 'gift' they received is valued higher than 22 Eur.

And you know, nobody really cares about such small tax evasion. I casually receive packages from outside EU, clearly marked as not gifts with high values, and I still receive them without any customs notification. Of course, if I wish to enter those purchases into my expenses, I need to contact the customs myself.
Ya thats pretty much where I stopped thinking about the whole situation once it hit the ownership part. But that would give Valve an escape route if it ever came down to it. I would think with Steam's high profile it would atleast make them fairly cautious about this sort of thing though. And ya even in this case it wouldn't amount to a huge amount of tax, but if he'd been in business for a few more years it would have woken someone up eventually.

Either way its a Robin Hood sort of generosity hes going for. He can't expect the Sheriff to sit by and do nothing, whoever happens to be the Sheriff at that moment.
 

Jaeriko

New member
May 29, 2010
109
0
0
Chibz said:
Jaeriko said:
I noticed a lot of people early on in this thread and on pages 2/3 were ignoring that fact that he is SELLING the games.
Actually, he isn't. He's purchasing the game on their behalf. There's a subtle difference here.
He is trading them and receiving money for it, that alone would make it selling.

I don't see how it could be seen as not so, but could you please explain your point further?

Perhaps I am missing something.
 

whaleswiththumbs

New member
Feb 13, 2009
1,462
0
0
the only reason i am reading any of this is because i need something to do while i wait for people to reply on facebook.

OT:
I've had a problem with Steam before. wasnt about this kind of thing. but i can see where both sides are coming from. I think they guy could have done this smarter, he knew that he was circumventing the system and should have prepared for it
 

Zaik

New member
Jul 20, 2009
2,077
0
0
I'm not going to make any judgment here positive or otherwise, however whether you did it or not, someone could clearly buy games here and gift them to non-american steam users for american price + some extra, basically making a profit off of steam's silly price differences that don't really make sense in a digital distribution setting.

I'm not saying they're right or you're wrong here, however given that you clearly have the opportunity to be making a profit at their expense, and they have no way to track whether you are or not, so even if they were somehow okay with gifting the games at cost, they wouldn't allow someone to do it.
 

Chibz

New member
Sep 12, 2008
2,158
0
0
Jaeriko said:
He is trading them and receiving money for it, that alone would make it selling.

I don't see how it could be seen as not so, but could you please explain your point further?

Perhaps I am missing something.
Strictly speaking he's purchasing the game with their money. The exchange goes...

They hand him the money (via paypal). He goes to the store (Steam) and buys the game with their money (Paypal). He then hands them the product (Gift). He's buying it on their behalf.
 

Karma168

New member
Nov 7, 2010
541
0
0
a good analogy is amazon/ebay. you look for item X in your local stores, local websites etc. and find that the cheapest price is $Y, you then look further afield and find that the object is $Z (Z<Y) in another country. why would you pay the extra money that it would cost to buy it at home?

people all over the world make money by buying stuff cheap in one place, shipping it to another location and selling it at a value that undercuts the higher local price. why should this case be different? even if he broke tax laws, that's an issue for the courts, not steam to rule on.
 

Trolldor

New member
Jan 20, 2011
1,849
0
0
Chibz said:
Jaeriko said:
He is trading them and receiving money for it, that alone would make it selling.

I don't see how it could be seen as not so, but could you please explain your point further?

Perhaps I am missing something.
Strictly speaking he's purchasing the game with their money. The exchange goes...

They hand him the money (via paypal). He goes to the store (Steam) and buys the game with their money (Paypal). He then hands them the product (Gift). He's buying it on their behalf.
In order to avoid tax.
 

Trolldor

New member
Jan 20, 2011
1,849
0
0
Karma168 said:
a good analogy is amazon/ebay. you look for item X in your local stores, local websites etc. and find that the cheapest price is $Y, you then look further afield and find that the object is $Z (Z<Y) in another country. why would you pay the extra money that it would cost to buy it at home?

people all over the world make money by buying stuff cheap in one place, shipping it to another location and selling it at a value that undercuts the higher local price. why should this case be different? even if he broke tax laws, that's an issue for the courts, not steam to rule on.
Yes, it is an issue for steam because if they refuse to take action they are complicit in the act.
 

Asuka Soryu

New member
Jun 11, 2010
2,437
0
0
Blue_vision said:
Not so much "being generous" as deliberately trying to cheat the system. Valve and the publisher may still be making money off of it, but that's like jacking someone's car, but leaving them $10.

Wait, what?

So them losing like maybe 10-20$ is equivalent to justifying Grand Theft Auto of what could be well over 2000$ by leaving a ten spot, and the person stranded who isn't a company and couldn't neglect such a thing.

The more I look at your analogy, the more I can't help but feel it's a horrible analogy.


Also, the person may not have been willing to buy the game due to it's American price, so they would've lost his sale anyways.

But a person wouldn't steal a car if they didn't have 10$ to leave behind?
 

blankedboy

New member
Feb 7, 2009
5,234
0
0
Bobic said:
Gindil said:
Bobic said:
If your steam account gets banned do you lose access to all the games you bought for yourself?
No. You just lose access to Steam secured servers.
Gather said:
Bobic said:
If your steam account gets banned do you lose access to all the games you bought for yourself?
Yes.
Ok, one of you heartless fiends is lying to me.
You do lose them all. I'd know, I hacked awhile ago and got my account banned.
By the way, don't hack.
 

gl1koz3

New member
May 24, 2010
931
0
0
Least you can do is notice that Steam prices for games is not the same across all of EU. So, you can file a complaint to EU pointing that out...
 

Zer_

Rocket Scientist
Feb 7, 2008
2,682
0
0
Chibz said:
Trolldor said:
In order to avoid tax.
Actually, there's no tax in the equation yet. It's more to avoid the rather ridiculous price difference.
Isn't VAT included in the price? Any local taxes are obviously applied after the fact.
 

Chibz

New member
Sep 12, 2008
2,158
0
0
Zer_ said:
Isn't VAT included in the price? Any local taxes are obviously applied after the fact.
Nope, this is just the price before anything is applied. Regardless, the person did pay tax. To the applicable country (where it was bought), even if VAT did apply to such a product.
 

Adzma

New member
Sep 20, 2009
1,287
0
0
Blue_vision said:
Not so much "being generous" as deliberately trying to cheat the system. Valve and the publisher may still be making money off of it, but that's like jacking someone's car, but leaving them $10.
You have obviously never had to pay the mark ups that we in Europe and Australia have to put up with. They constantly feed us bullshit like it's "Manufacturing costs" but Steam has none, so why do we pay $90+ while North America pays only $60 or so?

I've done this myself, paid someone in the US to gift me a game. I pay less, and it's the same game as the one that's nearly twice the price.
 

LawlessSquirrel

New member
Jun 9, 2010
1,105
0
0
Yes, that's against the rules. It's considered selling the game instead of just gifting it. I think that rule's there to prevent the case of buying 6 packs and such of games to sell to others for a profit.

The ban is justified, but the price increases are ridiculous. 80% mark-up purely because of my location? Yeah, I'll pass. I'll just buy two different games instead...still over steam though because an 80% mark up is still better than 120%.

It's not Valve's fault though. It's the publishers that pick the prices for each region, Steam just enforces them. Activision, for example, loves to overcharge people. What annoys me is that they can get away with it because our retail is worse.

(Hate this country...)