Europe has some of the most customer friendly laws anywhere in the world- they’re far ahead of the curve in this regard, implementing policies that the rest of the world only catches up to years later. So it should come as no surprise, for example, that Europe has some extremely progressive customer protection laws for digital purchases, too.
Essentially, in Europe, you are required to give customers the right to cancel digital pre-orders- a right that Nintendo does not allow on the eShop, and that Valve, Sony, and EA don’t obtain express consent from customers on the latter’s waiver to their rights to withdrawal [of digital purchases]. This has caused the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) to report all four for being in contravention of European Customer Protection legislation.
To this, all I can say is: good. I hope that this causes better protection of digital purchases on EA, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve’s gaming platforms (Microsoft is far ahead of everyone else in this regard, thankfully).
