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screenshot of a Tweet from Running With Scissors reading

“We’ve been told our games are too expensive in some countries but we’ve been using Steam’s recommended pricing for a while. We trust Valve enough to not change this. If our games are still too expensive for you, you can pirate them until you have enough to support us.”

  • In Europe at least if strong authentication was done during the purchase (and it is mandatory since a few years), the merchant is protected and the bank issued the card will take the loss. They don’t need to refund or pay fees for charge back.

    • Are you sure? My stripe merchant account still mentions the 15 euro chargeback fee and now in my country is easier to ask for a chargeback, can do at the phone while before you needed to send a registered snail mail at a secret address with the right timing using a secret form, while sending a copy of the police report via fax

      • SCA (strong customer authentication) should indeed move the liability for fraudulent purchases to the issuer. Wording in contracts may still mention other things. We had to, for one specific payment service provider, explicitly tell them to only allow card purchases using SCA since we had problems with stolen cards. With some PSPs we could just refuse certain ECI codes. Been a few years for me and YMMV but if chargebacks are causing headaches it might be worth looking into.

      • I worked at company like stripe and exactly at the scope of authentication/liability. I am not sure about whatever you pay the charge back fee even though the liability is shifted from you to the issuer bank. Do you have 3DS2 enabled for your payments?

        It is normal that Stripe mention the charge back fees as there are exceptions for strong authentication but it is worth asking them for details and whatever you pay the fee even when liability have been shifted. And maybe the issuer bank will just do refund and take the loss if it see the SCA have been done.