14 DAY TRIAL // Valve’s Steam is by far the largest digital distribution service for PC gamers. You subscribe for free and have access to the largest PC offering in the world. Then you start purchasing games that populate your library and soon enough you end up having too many games and too little time to play them all.
A few hundred games should be enough to make you forget whether or not you own a certain game that is not on sale on various other digital distribution services. It’s not funny, but some PC gamers have more than one thousand games in their Steam libraries and very few have managed to go through half of them.
Bottom line is that, even with a service like Steam that allows users to filter their libraries and organize their games in various categories, it’s still very hard to keep track of all your games when you own a few hundred.
But what if you purchase a game at some point and then the game gets removed by Valve from your Steam library without the company informing you of the “deed”?
You may unknowingly purchase the same game twice
The problem is there’s a chance that the removal of the game might be a mistake from Valve’s part and you might end up purchasing it again if you forget that you already had it in your Steam library.
No one wants to pay twice for the same product, but this can happen because Valve rarely bothers announcing subscribers when removing a game from their library.
The reason might be the fact that Valve’s customer service is overwhelmed by the number of tickets they have to process each day, but a company that big should have enough employees to handle all customers’ issues.
Not to mention that, whenever you find out that one of the games you previously owned and played quite a lot in the past has been removed by Valve without being offered any explanations, there’s little chance to get it back even if your purchase was in good faith.
Most of these issues happen when purchasing games through retailers other than Steam, but they can also occur when using VPNs to access other country’s store with cheaper prices on games.
That way at least you know that you have to purchase the game again and not use the same seller that put you in this situation in the first place.
There are times when Steam subscribers are informed that one or more games have been removed from their libraries, but only because they are also given a warning.
Getting an explanation from Valve's Steam support service can take weeks
By not informing its Steam subscribers about the removal of one or more games from their libraries, Valve prevents them from contacting customers support and asking for explanations.
It gets even worse, as once you notice that a game has been removed from your Steam library and open a ticket to customer service, it takes days until you get a reply. You could have more luck complaining on reddit than by opening a ticket to Steam support service.
I wish Valve would inform every Steam subscriber when a game is removed from their library, along with an explanation on why they have done it. That will make things simpler for both users and service provider, but that’s the problem with companies that completely dominate a certain market.
To be clear, I’m not saying that no one is getting informed about the removal of their games from Steam library. I’m saying that everyone should be notified when they are denied access to a title they have previously purchased and added to Steam library.