Valve will see you in court! No, really, Steam's just updated its subscriber agreement so that 'all disputes and claims proceed in court'

If you live outside the United Kingdom or EU, you might've had a pop-up lunge into your Steam game today informing you, helpfully, that updates to the Steam Subscriber Agreement had affected your consumer rights.

That's because Valve is removing both its class action waiver and forced arbitration clauses for affected countries, as the notice reads: «The updated dispute resolution provisions are in Section 10 and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not arbitration.»

A forced arbitration clause is, as the name suggests, a clause that forces those who agree to a contract to settle disputes by arbitration. Instead of going to court, you and the respondent—in this case, Valve—would have several meetings with an independent arbitrator, who is then able to give a legally-binding «award».

What this clause can and can't handle depends on a country's individual laws—for example, in 2022, the United States Congress ended forced arbitration applying to sexual assault cases—but by and large, they're considered a tidier way of handling legal disputes. They do, however, often come under criticism for handing a lot of power over to the big companies that use these clauses. Arbitrations don't typically have juries, arbitrators can consider «apparent fairness» over the exact letter of the law, and if you lose the case it's very hard to challenge.

So why has Valve made this change? Well, while I've reached out (and will update this article if I receive a response), I'm willing to bet the concept of «arbitration overload» has something to do with it.

Back in 2020, companies like Comcast and AT&T were ambushed when a few enterprising lawyers discovered that, as an alternative to class action lawsuits, people under forced arbitration could simply band together and file their requests for arbitration all at once. As the New York Times put it: «Many companies, it turns out, can't handle the caseload.» It's sort of like a real-world DDOS attack.

This resulted in