[devit]

> This way in the worst case, the player receives the item in their inventory and isn’t charged immediately. In practice, this has proven to occur very rarely and has been an acceptable tradeoff.

Except that now the player can spend the money twice in the race window...

That kind of sloppiness by game developers might be related to the launch problems they have.

[dikaiosune]

Not having worked in game dev, it seems to me that some of the industry problems (high pressure launches, high turnover rate among developers, low ability to address or prevent technical debt) are responsible for at least some of the sloppiness. I'd think it really hard to make the right infrastructure decisions (and implementations) when you have a year or two to build a multi-million user infrastructure that has to adapt flexibly to any changing requirements from the game producers/directors/publishers and which will be thrown away a few years after that.

[scrollaway]

And having worked in gamedev, I can say you're correct. There's two kinds of studios that are affected by launch issues: The crazy big ones, who run into even crazier numbers that would make twitter/facebook engineers' heads spin... and the awful ones, that have the kind of issues you're describing and have launch issues because of management and/or technical incompetence. Though it's not mutually exclusive.

[krapp]

Also, it seems as if the incentive isn't there. Game studios know they can put a broken product on the market and still make money on it.

[hacker_9]

Which is why steam refunds make so much sense - as it's all digital, buying and refunding are the same couple of easy button clicks for the consumer. If this where to happen on the mobile app market it would be a game changer (because of the 100x more indie games there).