| I fought for a refund from Valve for about a week. Couldn't get one. I'm still a bit salty about it. I forget how many tens of hours I'd spent expecting to arrive at anything resembling what was alluded to in the trailers or demos. It was probably 20+ hours until I realized that the problem wasn't related to progression-locked content. I'd been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed. I was mad. Sure. But I was more hurt and disappointed than anything. I can no longer trust Hello Games or Valve. Hello lied to consumers and Valve, from my perspective, backed them up while allowing a select few to actually recieve refunds for the sake of PR. I understand the desire to protect Developers from unrealistic backlash. You've got to draw a line somewhere which, after crossing, makes one ineligible for the normal refund process. I do think the placement of that line should vary by game (or at least genre) instead of the two hour hard cutoff Valve uses. For a game like No Man's Sky? At the two hour mark I was still taking in some of the visuals and geeking out about what I thought was coming. I definitely hadn't gotten into any of the completely broken mechanics, lack of depth of characters/worlds, or any other out of a plethora of disappointments and outright lies Hello had baked into the game and its marketing. So now, for most things, I refuse to pre-order. I might miss a few neat things that I would have gotten otherwise, however; I won't get robbed again. |
You'd been swindled, sure. Plain and simple. Not robbed.
Letting anger and frustration escalate beyond the scope of an injustice isn't doing anyone any good. I agree though, a more judicial approach to refunds is probably warranted for a game that SO under delivered on the hype. This isn't in the same ballpark of a let down as Spore.