The games industry is a very heavily commercially driven venture, I think there is literally no one out there who is surprised to hear this fact. Gaming is so commercial in fact, that is currently the single most profitable entertainment medium in the world. (And no, I will never stop parroting that fact until it's no longer true.) With that in mind, it makes sense that purely commercial matters enter the discussion surrounding this artform more often then one might think that they should. In this instance I'm talking about refunds, which is something that is becoming discussed more and more frequently in the gaming world. Address the latest 'gaming media site' and you'll probably hear something along the lines about how the rise in gaming refund correlates directly with a rise in gamer entitlement; but the truth is that as gaming becomes more complicated it becomes easier for consumers to accidentally slip into a purchase which delivers nothing but buyers remorse.
With that I'm taking all the blame away from the developer and attributing it purely on the decisions of the buyer, however there are instance in the world where the marketing of a game is intentionally misleading in order to trick people into signing up for a game before they know what they're getting into. (Yes, arguably this is still the fault of the consumer, but that doesn't make shady publishers and/or developers innocent in such a scenario.) We saw this with Anthem, Watch_Dogs, Far Cry, Assassin's Creed Unity, Killzone 2, Halo 3 and a whole host of games both modern and classic that choose to wear falsehoods in order to secure early sales. (and a frightening amount of those titles are Ubisoft games.)
To give this situation a more contemporary twist, take a look at 'Warcraft 3 Reforged', a game which you'll be very familiar with if you've spent anytime on this blog. This game marketed itself as a complete remake of the classic strategy title Warcraft 3 and used a deluge of buzz words and a pretty cinematic trailer to drive the point home. They promised completely redone cutscenes, new story elements and a whole host of QOL changes that would bring back to life one of the most celebrated strategy games of all time. All this positivity was maintained practically until the day of launch, with the team only vaguely mentioning their leaning off on the new story elements through an offhand comment in a small interview. (But they didn't bother update that fact on their official website) Then the game launched to a whole slew of issues and missing promised features that I've gone into detail about before so don't need to do so again. The point is, fans needed a refund and they needed it now.
At the time Blizzard were very reticent about obliging these demands, they are a studio with a track record for being awful with refunds and they wanted to defend that to the end. They had to be forced into a corner to offer refunds by overwhelming public backlash, and when you think about it that's just insane, isn't it? If a customer is unhappy with their product after using is for one hour, then why would you not oblige them returning it? Why stubbornly hold onto the £60 they payed you and risk missing out on an entire life-time worth of new game purchases once that customer realises what a greedy arse you are? It makes literally no financial sense which is why I don't understand why so many companies take a hard-line stance for it. Nintendo are renowned for this sort of behaviour, despite their core demographic being children. (Who's preferences are more fickle than children's?) And Sony have the same sort of policies as was highlighted during the whole Anthem debacle wherein the company choose to wait until the game was provably unplayable before throwing refunds to players.
Amidst all this over bearing greed stands one company who, at this point, are probably just pursuing these headlines for the sole purpose of rubbing them in the faces of everyone else in the industry. I only found out about this when I read the headline title about how GOG was asking customers not to abuse their new 30 day refund policy. (Yeah, I was shocked too.) For those who don't know, GOG is actually a PC storefront that is owned and operated by CD Projekt Red, and they often sell games that are free of DRM. (Which is nice as such DRM can be performance killers on lower-end systems.) As GOG doesn't rely on distributing Steam Keys, they can even sell games that aren't supported by Steam like "The Elder Scrolls: Redgaurd". (So that's kind of cool too.)
As stated, this new policy by them will allow folk to buy and play a video game for up to 30 days before turning it in for refunds. Now I'm sure there must be some extra layers to this refund policy that aren't immediately clear (layers which I can't presently find) but still you have to gawk at the boldness of it all. Steam and the Epic store both maintain a 14 day refund policy but that only remains applicable if you've played less than two hours of the game in question; as far as I can tell it seems that GOG's new policy doesn't even have that stipulation. (Which is pretty crazy.) I do wonder at how many people will actually heed CDPR's plea not to abuse the system and how many others were given the idea to by the plea itself.
Immediately there has been some backlash from developers who work with GOG that had no idea of this new system being put into place. Personally, I do understand where they are coming from and feel their concerns are very warranted. There's not a game out there that cannot be completed in under 30 days and honestly I can count the number of games with which I've spent more than thirty days playing on one hand. (There are 4 and they're all Bethesda games.) In an ideal world this will not be an issue, but I fear for what may happen to smaller developers once more unscrupulous elements catch wind of this. To their credit, CDPR have acknowledged the possibility of abusers and mentioned that they are observing for such situations in order to minimise potential harm to developers; but if I was one of the folk in the crosslines I would hardly be relived about the prospect of trusting my financial well-being to a third party.
This is the conundrum when it comes to dealing with situations like the instituting of a refund policy. You're either too strict to the point where folks aren't okay with supporting your actions, or too lax to the point where other folks are eager to exploit you. Somewhere in the middle there's a grey area that no one quite has a handle on yet. Personally, as much as I love CDPR I feel that their new refund policy needs a harder limit if it doesn't have one already. Perhaps a 10 hour playtime limit would suffice, because if you've played any longer than that then you've probably got the value that you payed for out of the game and shouldn't really be looking for a refund. There's a lot more factors that go into policies like this, however, and I fear I'm not qualified to address them all. (Offer me a salary, CDPR, and I may change my mind on that front.) But I leave you with a conundrum and a question; How would you handle such a choice and do you think CDPR's policy is perfectly consumer friendly or too developer unfriendly? (or both?)
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