Tag: Refund

Stadia Offering Refunds For Early Buyers Of Freebies


This week Google announced that December will bring with it two new Stadia games: Farming Simulator 19 and Tomb Raider. The news is great if you’re one of those people who bought a Stadia and wanted some more free games. If you’re one of the people who bought those games only to see them be handed out for free barely two weeks after the device launched, you’re probably not too happy.

While Tomb Raider purchasers would normally just be out $10, Farming Simulator 19 costs $40. That’s a steep price for two weeks early access to a game that technically released over a year ago. Thankfully even Google is smart enough to know when to fold them, and announced that both games will be refunded to those who ask for it, even if it is outside of the normal policy.

“We know that some users have recently purchased these two games for their collection. Because of the proximity between the launch of the platform, and the announcement of these titles in Stadia Pro, we’re happy to assist you if you’d like to request a refund if you have purchased either or both of these titles, even if it’s outside of our normal policy.”

You’ll need to manually request a refund, however.

Source: Stadia

Vicious Circle Goes Free To Play, Refunds Everyone


Back in September we reported on the failed launch of Vicious Circle, the latest title from Rooster Teeth Games. In that time, the crew has been working behind the scenes and at the start of the month announced that not only would Vicious Circle be going free to play, but that those who bought founders packs would be refunded.

“Why is Vicious Circle going Free to Play? In short, the game didn’t succeed. We came together on a super creative ambitious new project, put our hearts into it, did our best to support it, and it didn’t work out, and that’s okay. Not every idea we have will be a success. We have to fail to find success. Servers will remain up because we made a game and we want the community to still have a chance to play it. We don’t want price to get in the way. We remain proud of the work that was put into the game and want as many people to have the chance to experience it as possible.”

Don’t get too excited about that free to play, though. While the game is going free to play, Rooster Teeth has no intention of supporting the title outside of some bug fixes.

Source: Steam

Crowdfunding Update: Greed Monger Delivering Refunds To Backers


Greed Monger is a bit of a touchy subject here at MMO Fallout, considering it’s one of the few games that we outright refused to publicize should it ever reappear on Kickstarter, but we have some positive news on the game and its creator Jason Appleton. While Appleton may not have had much success creating video games, as evidenced by the crowdfunding and subsequent fall of Greed Monger, the man does appear to have more of a conscious than your average failed Kickstarter project and a willingness to right past wrongs.

That, and an impressive portfolio of cryptocurrency, because Appleton has taken a step extraordinary for Kickstarter creators and has begun extending refunds out of pocket. Backers have received updates over the past week or so letting them know that they can submit refund requests that will be processed through Paypal (or Bitcoin if that’s your preference). The refunds have started flowing, with Appleton noting that he is limited to $2,000 per day via Paypal restrictions on transfers.

Thank you guys for being patient. Its not easy coming up with 6 figures to repay donations to a passion project. But we are going to get there.

Backers interested in receiving refunds should check out the link below. Appleton took the time to post on Massively’s coverage that this controversy had been weighing on his mind for years and that in retrospect he understands the skepticism of the original campaign.

“As for the Refunds, yes, this has been a plague on my mind for many years and finally being in a position to make it all right has been a huge load off. I truly believed this project could be done. I thought everyone telling me I was crazy for even thinking it to be possible just jealous for having gotten funding from KS. Knowing what I know now, I realize why I was branded as a scammer from before the KS even ended. If I saw me today, trying to Kickstart a similar project , knowing what I know now, I’d think it was a bullshit cash grab too. I was just very ignorant and too trusting.”

(Source: Kickstarter)

Column How Reddit Once Again Bamboozled the Media


I have a distinct advantage over traditional media with MMO Fallout; I don’t run ads, I don’t have sponsors, and I have given minimal thought to opening a Patreon. As an entity, I am completely unaccountable for boosting views to their maximum potential, and as a result I enjoy the unique trait of not being beholden to being the first to publish a breaking story. I do try to keep the news relevant, but at least I have the time to do some fact checking.

Which leads me to this week’s failure to communicate: A number of news websites are running retractions and corrections after it was revealed that stories on Reddit are not entirely trustworthy. A user in the Star Citizen community claimed that he had managed to obtain a refund in excess of $45,000, in the form of three $15,000 refunds for his clan, and that the process had been a "nightmare." This got picked up by a number of websites, I won’t be calling them out because that’s not the point of this article.

So let’s go through the piece and I’ll offer my thought process that came to ignoring this news piece:

"It was a nightmare getting the refund, we are a commercial org and pooled the money to buy the completionist packages, and used a corporate card to buy them, so we had major issues with getting refunded to the same card, paypal and then providing ID. Total it took about 5 weeks to get sorted. A lot of time was spent trying to explain the situation to some woman called "Schala" and just getting the same answers copied and pasted backwards and forwards, they definitely try to delay you as much as possible in the hope you’ll forget or give up."

First let’s get out of the way that this is a first party Reddit story and therefore automatically less credible than your average "Zombie Elvis Lives in Reno" story on the Enquirer (he still performs in Vegas as a member of the Blue Man Group, as anyone knows). On policy, I don’t trust anything that is posted as a story on Reddit, even if the person has "evidence" in the form of easily doctored screenshots and gifs, and doubly so if said poster claims it’s "impossible" to fake navigating a website in a video. It is possible, and it’s very easy.

I also had trouble believing the part of the story that they were trying to delay as much as possible in the hopes that the issue would be forgotten or that he would give up. I don’t think any company thinks that a customer is just going to give up on nearly fifty grand.

Now I don’t claim to be a licensed journalist with a fancy journalism degree, but I know enough from experience and from watching all three seasons of The Newsroom to know that stories must be verified before they are printed. In the thread, another moderator independently verified the refund claims, a factor that isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. You’re verifying an anonymous source with another anonymous source.

So the proper thing to do would be to contact Cloud Imperium Games for confirmation which evidently nobody did before rushing this story to print. CIG has come out since then and stated that the refund was more along the lines of $330 and that the refund was handled smoothly and without issues, also noting that most of the story regarding delays was completely fabricated.

And in case you had any remaining doubts, the user subsequently deleted his account. Case closed. I’m hesitant to attribute the story to "haters" as some in the Star Citizen community have, if anything this is a case of an attention-grabbing headline driving the news on the backs of "well we did say it was just an allegation." And judging by the number of comments on individual articles, it was a success.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Prey Developer: Consider Steam’s Refund Policy Your Demo


Prey launches on PC and consoles this week, and while gamers on Xbox and Playstation were able to gauge their interest thanks to a pre-release demo, PC gamers haven’t been afforded the same luxury. Thankfully, Co-Creative Director Raphael Colantonio has a solution: Buy the game anyway, and just make use of Steam’s refund policy. Steam, for those out of the know, allows automatic refunds for games within two weeks or two hours of gameplay, whichever comes first.

“It’s just a resource assignment thing. We couldn’t do a demo on both the console and on the PC, we had to choose. And besides, PC has Steam. Steam players can just return the game [prior to playing] 2 hours so it’s like a demo already.

There are a few important notes to keep in mind that if you’re using Colantonio’s suggestion, foremost being that you have to buy the game through Steam. Registering a third party key will invalidate your eligibility for a refund. Furthermore, the two hour gameplay cutoff isn’t a hard line, but you’ll be dealing with Steam’s customer support and the good will of whoever you happen to be sent to. Finally, there are no guidelines for what constitutes refund abuse, so if you’ve been refunding a lot of games Valve may cut you off.

Otherwise, just think of Prey on PC requiring a $60-80 deposit, depending on your region.

(Source: Aus Gamer)

No Man’s Sky: The Game That Broke Refund Policies


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The list of unfulfilled promises for No Man’s Sky is at least a mile long, and you can read it for yourself, but those looking to escalate the situation to a full refund may have found an ally: Valve themselves. While Sony and Microsoft have proven unwilling to refund digital purchases even in cases of fraud, the refund policy at Valve is simple: Two hours of gameplay or two weeks after purchase, whichever comes first. In rare cases, where a game is either broken or misleadingly advertised, they make an exception.

Such is the case with No Man’s Sky, where players are reporting that not only is Valve processing refunds, but so is Sony on the Playstation 4. Various Reddit threads are filling up with players revealing that Valve, Sony, and Amazon are all processing refunds for No Man’s Sky digital and physical purchases (in the case of Amazon).

In the two weeks since its launch on PC, No Man’s Sky has plummeted in peak players from over two hundred thousand to under twenty thousand.

steamchart

In the case of Steam, users are recommending submitting multiple refund requests if the first one or two are rejected, and that users should cite false advertising as their reason for requesting a refund. Amazon and Good Old Games have been quite lenient according to reports with Amazon’s live chat being more than helpful in processing refunds. For Playstation, one user recommended using the following in your refund request:

“The game lacks many features that were advertised and I’ve experienced multiple crashes.”

According to a few reports via Reddit, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the only store giving a hard time for refunds is the No Man’s Sky official website. Users on Neogaf are also compiling a list of successful refund stories.

In the two weeks since its launch, No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has faced intense backlash over allegations that the company misled customers into purchasing the game, heavily advertising features just months before launch that were either released incomplete or removed from the game altogether.

Arkham Knight Refundable Through End Of Year


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After four months of absence, Batman: Arkham Knight is finally available for sale on PC again. Despite numerous patches, however, many customers are still finding the game in an unacceptable state, with bugs and performance issues still causing problems.

Luckily for affected customers, Warner Bros has made it possible to refund the game for any reason up until the end of the year, regardless of how much time you’ve invested.

Until the end of 2015, we will be offering a full refund on Batman: Arkham Knight PC, regardless of how long you have played the product. You can also return the Season Pass along with the main game (but not separately). For those of you that hold onto the game, we are going to continue to address the issues that we can fix and talk to you about the issues that we cannot fix.

Standard Steam refund policy allows for refunds within two weeks and with less than two hours of gameplay.

(Source: Steam)

Square Enix Apologizes For FFXIV On Mac, Offers Refunds


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Direct Naoki Yoshida has posted a letter to Final Fantasy XIV fans, apologizing for issues with the mac client. The mac version of FFXIV launched on June 23rd, and it became immediately apparent that the game was not running properly on many systems, even those who met the minimum requirements. According to Yoshida, in the chaos before the launch, the wrong system requirements were posted, leading to players purchasing the game who would be unable to play it.

I believe that the biggest problem with the Mac version release was the significant discrepancy between the performance of the product our development team produced and the expectations our customers had for it, which was due to the lack of information available on our product when sales commenced, as well as other issues. I would like to explain in detail how this happened.

For players who purchased FFXIV and cannot play it, Square is offering refunds. This includes refunds for those of you who purchased game time cards. You can find the rather lengthy explanation at the link below.

(Source: FFXIV)

[Column] Shovelware Makers On Steam Should Be Afraid


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Today marked the day that Valve took a leap forward for the cause of customer service and announced that players would be allowed to return their games, no questions asked, within two weeks or two hours of game time, whichever comes first. There are certain caveats to the deal on what can be returned and what can’t, but as far as the crucial details go, two weeks or two hours is all you really need to know.

Before I start to get critical, I’d like to point out that I have been calling for a refund system on Steam for years, as their “all sales final” policy has been more and more problematic when coupled with their laissez faire policy on curation allowing broken games to make their way into the store space. Valve already does what it can to deny these games front page coverage, but this policy will be the silver bullet to possibly knock specific developers off of Steam forever. You know the ones I mean.

I also don’t see this as a big problem for independent developers putting out cheap games at low prices. As has been echoed by other voices on the web, I feel that anyone who would buy a short indie game to play it for an hour or so and then refund it wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of buying it in the first place, and would likely pirate it. The only measurable notice that the dev will see are the sales going up, and then slightly coming down.

One are where I do see this having a harmful effect on a legitimate developer is in the realm of review bombing, an issue that is already prevalent on free to play and low cost items, but will now be easier if groups of people can buy easily buy a game, bring the overall rating down, and then all request a refund and walk out without a loss of their own. Review bombing is a problem as it is.

For PC gamers, this system is great. The small demo or benchmark download is, with some exception, just about extinct, and with the variety of PC builds available, there is no way of knowing for sure if a game will run on your system without forking over the sixty bucks and praying. Additionally, it also knocks out a good source of income for developers releasing poor quality games and cashing in before word of mouth spreads.

Which brings me full circle to the point of this article, Valve has put a bullet in the head of fly by night developers peddling their wares on Steam. Not only do they struggle to find an audience, thanks to a lack of presence on the main page, but now their source of income (ill informed customers) has been cut off at the neck.

I’ll end this by recommending that you don’t assume that every developer that has concerns about the system is hiding bad intentions, just as well that any customer who applauds the system is just looking for some easy free games. Valve’s lack of specificity and reminder that each refund is handled case by case means that we’ll need to wait until the system is actually used to see where it is ripe for abuse, and where Valve draws the line.

Overall, this system is a major leap forward for Valve as a company and Steam as a platform.

Steam Introduces 14-Day Refunds


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Valve has surprised us again with the reveal of a new refund policy, allowing customers to get a full refund on their purchase, for any reason, withing two weeks of the purchase. Bought a game and can’t play it? System not powerful? Game broken beyond playable? Didn’t like it? Not a problem. Valve will be honoring refunds for any game, so long as the game hasn’t been played for more than two hours and the request is made within fourteen days.

Refunds will not be given for 3rd party purchases (steam keys, wallet cards, etc), movies (for obvious reasons), games that have been VAC banned, and gifts that have been redeemed by the recipient. The good news is that you should also be able to get a refund should a game you just purchased go on sale.

Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.

(Source: Steam)