Up to 30 days after purchase
The UK has some fairly decent consumer protection laws, compared to the nonsense I’ve heard happen in other countries. The only problem is that they could be fairly vague, and fighting for your rights often involved getting our hero Dominic Littlewood to grab his TV crew and go to shout at some companies for you.
The new Consumer Rights Act that came in from October 1 aims to redefine and demystify a lot of the rights consumers have, as well as expanding those rights to new types of products. Importantly, those rights are now extended digital goods.
This is the first time that consumer rights when it comes to digital content have been set out clearly in the UK. If a digital product or service is faulty, not as described or not of satisfactory quality (as deemed by the Sale of Goods Act 1979), then you are now entitled to a refund under UK law. Citizens Advice explicitly mentions games, audiobooks, and music as content that’s affected by the new law.
The new act means if you’ve bought a faulty product in the past 30 days, and can prove it’s faulty through no fault of your own (pretty easy for a bit of digital content), you’re now entitled to a refund. After six months, if a refund is still granted (it’s often not legally required at this point, but it still happens) then no deductions are allowed to be made from it. If the buyer wants a total refund, that’s what they get.
You can read the Citizen’s Bureau (a government organisation) explanation, and you can read the actual legislation itself. Alternatively, Which.co.uk does a much better breakdown of the legalese and shows that essentially this new act is fantastic news for British buyers and bad news for the likes of the latest Tony Hawk game.
Of course companies are going to try and find a way around it just like they did for the previous version of the legislation, but it will be incredibly interesting to see how it affects companies like Netflix and Steam. Any company that does business in the UK is bound by UK law, so being based outside of the country won’t do them any good.
It’s worth noting that 30 days is considerably longer than the two weeks given by Steam, so whether this will cause a policy change there isn’t known.
