If you ask someone working in the tech industry what sort of “buzzword” can be used to describe 2024, I bet that most people you run into would answer “AI” and that’s true but will this year also be the year of “reminding megacorps of their place and not treat its customers/clients/stakeholders like air”?
Simply speaking, big shots across multiple tech industries of Valve, Intel, and Adobe have been roped into lawsuits with some of them being class action levels so this is just a short thread that helps you catch on with whatever details floating publicly right now.
Valve – Too badass of a company
Steam Sales titan Lord Gaben and his company Valve are currently being sued by one Vicki Shotbolt who’s the campaigner for children’s digital rights alongside UK-based law firm Milberg London, accusing Valve of “rigging the UK market and taking advantage of UK gamers by overcharging them”. And they want $843 million of out this.
The point isn’t super straightforward though as the statement made by Shotbolt explains it from another standpoint, Valve “shuts off competition by [forcing] publishers to agree on price parity obligations” so that they are unable to drop their prices on other platforms if said publishers are opting in for a cross-platform strategy.
So in short, if one cannot enjoy a lower price in other places which leads to platform switching, Valve is the one “at wrong” here.
They also made some more points including add-on content like DLCs must also be purchased from Steam if the base game was also from there, this is called tying by legal terms, as well as “Up to 30% commissions which is excessive”.
Although they are claiming up to 14 million UK gamers would fall into the bad side of this practice, these are just “numbers” and are not actually signed by people who want to be represented in this.
But at the time of writing, no official response from the UK Appeal Tribunal has been publicized for this matter because if the case is to be attended to legally, authorizations and approvals are needed from the body.
This also means Valve could walk away scot-free, again.
Intel – Whoops, we lost “some” money
From getting bad luck on discovering an ancient site leading to a halt on the construction of its Germany fab, Intel has been on the bad luck streak for quite a time, and if that’s not enough, the latest class action lawsuit to be faced by them is going to make things worse.
Headed by its own investors together with Levi and Korsinsky firm, they are accusing Team Blue of “not properly disclosing the P/L figures of its manufacturing division, particularly in the loss numbers” for the fiscal year of 2023.
Before Q1 2024 when Intel’s ‘internal foundry’ model goes live for external clients to come and manufacture/package chips from ‘Intel Foundry’, no part of the manufacturing division was reported separately, and instead, only the part of manufacturing services sold to external customers under Intel Foundry Services was ever touched.
So what happened here is that for last year, the newly formed division lost about $7 billion which you know, drove its stock price to an impactful crash and not only that, investors were damn stressed and upset when they found out about 30% of its production were outsourced to other parties like TSMC and others.
And as an investor, all they care about is the money – earnings, revenues, profits, whatever. And get this, -$2.5B out of the $4.4B revenue in Q1 2024. Yikes.
And that’s about it. Intel lied and people are getting mad about it and want to teach them a lesson.
Adobe – When the US government thinks you’re too shitty even for them
Now this is the big one – The Federal Trade Commission of the US will be taking action against Adobe alongside the 2 executives of the company, Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani.
The accusation includes “hiding early termination fee for the most popular subscription plan” as well as “making it customers difficult to cancel subscriptions”.
Originally filed by the Department of Justice (DoJ) through the notification and referral of the charges, Adobe intentionally pushed consumers to opt-in for the “annual paid monthly” subscription without fully disclosing and informing them that if canceling the plan within the 1st year, it would cost them hundreds of bucks (And that’s USD, mind you).
Although the meme of “American companies like to hide fees” to the point where “NO HIDDEN FEES” is an actual sales point for some people, FTC is basically going towards the big players here, especially one that became an “as-a-service” company starting 2012 when the shifted from “One Time Payment” per version to this subscription hell hole.
Here’s FTC’s deeper explanation of how Adobe abuses this.
“According to the complaint, when consumers purchase a subscription through the company’s website, Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year. Adobe’s ETF disclosures are buried on the company’s website in small print or require consumers to hover over small icons to find the disclosures.“
And of course, being the capitalistic overlord hailing from the US, of course they wouldn’t even budge or respond to complaints. Additionally, Adobe even tries to “use the Early Termination Fee to deter its users from canceling” which is also bad and probably a violation of some sort of US law (I don’t know, I ain’t no lawyer, just a writer).
And there are also “bad customer service” issues – dropped calls, multiple transfers, resistance in helping customers to cancel their plans, you know all these kinds of tactics.
I’d say that there’s no such thing if you are having problems with payment or want to “know more about their products” eh.
Sources: gamesradar, Liberty Times Net, FTC
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