I could see these being difficult logistical problems for companies but that gives them no right to socialize the problem by playing hardball and holding accounts hostage. That problem is in their ___domain to solve, and sorry that being a profitable business is tough but, again, solving this is not on the customer.
Yeah that phrase doesn't really apply here. They're not pushing the solution onto any portion of the population - they're just straight up blackballing users.
I imagine the solution will simply be to charge higher prices across the board. We will all pay for the ability to charge back and not lose account access, including subsidizing the most flagrant abusers of such a policy. This could be a good trade off, but I think it's important to highlight that there is definitely no free lunch here and that legislating this problem away will have some downstream effects.
What’s the actual cost for chargebacks here? Presumably they are quite capable of revoking licenses to the purchased item. This is slightly hairier for in app purchases laundered through a game currency run by a third party, but still seems doable. Is there a reason the cost isn’t asymptotically close to 0 here?
In the worst case they stop allowing an account to make new purchases while keeping what they’ve bought. Is that an objectionable outcome?
Chargeback fees from processors are pretty steep -- $10+ per transaction. It's not simply the cost of the refund itself. The purpose of those fees is to incentivize merchants to be honest and good to their customers, although in the case of larger players those incentives can become perverse.
This assumes that current prices at all related to cost, which they are not for non-scarce goods like games and other digital content. Prices are set to maximize sales * revenue and adding a minor cost for Steam doesn't really factor into that.
They are related to cost on some level. This type of legislation would introduce some costs for merchants, even digital ones, because of chargeback fees charged by processors. That would be passed on to the customer in addition to whatever profit calculation those merchants are making.
