They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883

I have no idea how accurate this info on FindLaw.com is, but according to it, you don’t need a lawyer in small claims court (in the US). And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_claims_court there are many other countries with similar small claim courts: “Australia, Brazil, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Greece, New Zealand, Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States”. I know the list of countries is not even close to covering a large amount of Steam users, but I suspect that us Europeans are covered in other ways, so there’s that.

The Wikipedia page also mentions the lawyer thing, by the way:

A usual guiding principle in these courts is that individuals ought to be able to conduct their own cases and represent themselves without a lawyer. Rules are relaxed but still apply to some degree. In some jurisdictions, corporations must still be represented by a lawyer in small-claims court.

And I don’t think you need to sue Valve in the US. I think they’re required to have legal representation in the countries in which they operate, which should enable you to sue them “locally” in many cases. Again, not an expert, so I’m making quite a few assumptions here.

Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. I’ve edited my comment to reflect that. I didn’t read OP’s image but rather the news post by Valve on Steam, but missed the part that said: “the updated SSA now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration”.

it’s certainly not GOOD for Steam users to not be able to complain without lawyering up.

But doesn’t the change open up for litigation in small claims court? (Again, I’m in no way knowledgeable in US law, so I’m just asking.)

If, for example, I want to return a game in accordance with the rules and they won’t let me, I’m not gonna lawyer up and sue them from the other side of the Atlantic.

While supposedly being a lot cheaper than litigation, arbitration isn’t free either. Besides, arbitration makes it near-impossible to appeal a decision, and the outcome won’t set binding legal precedent. Furthermore, arbitration often comes with a class action waiver. Valve also removed that from the SSA.

I’m far from an expert in law, especially US law, but as I understand it, arbitration is still available (if both parties agree, I assume), it’s just not a requirement anymore [edit: nevermind, I didn’t understand it]. I’m sure they’re making this move because it somehow benefits them, but it still seems to me that consumers are getting more options [edit: they’re not] which is usually a good thing.

but chose bash because it made the most sense, that bash is shipped with most linux distros out of the box and one does not have to install another interpreter/compiler for another language.

Last time I checked (because I was writing Bash scripts based on the same assumption), Python was actually present on more Linux systems out of the box than Bash.

Enterprise licensing for self-hosted setups is priced per chunk of 64 GB of RAM in your cluster. I.e. if you run Elastic on 2 machines of 32 GB RAM each, you pay for 1 node. It sounds like there may have been some poor communication going on, because they definitely don’t base the pricing for self-hosted setups on the number of employees or anything like that.

They’re also not super uptight about you going over the licensing limit for a while. We’ve been running a couple of licenses short since we scaled our cluster up a while back. Our account manager knows and doesn’t care.