GOG.com pulls a massive pro-consumer move with updated refund policy

[RonnieOP]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I remember when Steam was first working out what would become the now standard 2 weeks or 2 hours playtime return system how there was controversy over the 2 hours part, and for good reason.  The simple fact is that games vary greatly.  A large open-world story-driven AAA like GTA or Skyrim could take dozens or even hundreds of hours to complete, assuming you play how you want and don't just rush for the finish.  Meanwhile, there are also some small indie games that could be completely beaten at a leisurely pace in just a few hours.  As such, the concern was that this 2 hour figure applied indiscriminately across the board would inevitably create a situation where some games could be played in their entirety and then returned illegitimately, and while still others (particularly the ones that, due to their price, need this policy most if we're being honest) would not really get the full benefit because you could not adequately try them in the allotted time.  I've experienced this myself personally.  When getting a substantial new game that I'm unsure if I'll like or not, that 2 hour limit is always in the back of my mind and puts quite a bit of pressure on me to try to rush through and experience as much as possible so I can make my decision quickly.  This unsurprisingly has a negative impact on the experience and can even lead to ultimately returning things that maybe would have been fine given more of a chance.

 

At the time (years ago), my proposal was to scale the return window to the game.  Developers would be responsible for labelling games with an estimated total playtime in hours, and the return window would be some percentage of this.  This would extend the window for big games that needed (and could afford) it, while shrinking it on games where it was excessive, solving the problem entirely.  One obvious potential issue is devs picking absurdly short times to effectively block people from refunding, but I believe that they would be held accountable by the market and people would not buy $20+ games that could be completed in 5 minutes.

 

Of course, another way to (sort of) solve this problem is just to effectively remove the limit all together.  30 days is a very long time and if you haven't tried the game adequately by then you probably never will.  This is fantastic for gamers but obviously does open them up to the potential for abuse.  With that said though, people said the same when Steam implemented their policy, and I don't think it's really become an issue.  They said at the time they would monitor use of the system and catch obvious abusers, and while I can't tell if that has happened or not, I don't really see signs anywhere that abuse is rampant.  No one talks about it.  Perhaps this will be the same.  The fact is there is already enormous potential for GOG to be abused by people buying 1 copy and sharing it to everyone they know due to the lack of DRM, but despite this they have been and continue to be successful.  Yes, there are a lot of bad people out there, but perhaps not quite as many as it takes to ruin it for the rest of us.

 

With all that said however, there is another method that's better than all of this.  It gives you unlimited time to test, while always being appropriately proportional to the game at hand so you see enough to know if you want it but not enough to spoil the full experience, is effectively impossible to abuse, and can work without money even changing hands!  Who else here remembers game demos and wonders what on earth happened to make them so rare when they are such an obviously smart concept that worked well for years and still does...

Game demos were amazing. My friend at school would give me his demo discs when he was done with them (he was a playstation mag subscriber) and i even had some from pizza hut. I wish they would come back, or just more "free to play" weekends or something.

 

But even then alot of people would still complain and say "the demo only lets you play the fun part the rest of the game is crap i want a refund"

 

The best answer tbh is to start doing your research before buying. In 2020 with hundreds of thousands of different gaming youtubers, websites, etc you can find gameplay/reviews of basically any game. Be smart with your money and alot of times you wont even need a refund option.

 

Now that being said theres still the chance of updates crashing the game and what not but that could happen a long time after the refund period of 30 days ended as well.

 

Its a complicated matter. but i firmly believe that most of it can be handled with people just doing more research before buying.

[Delicieuxz]

I hope this works out for GoG and that people don't exploit this. But it sounds as if there might be major room for exploitation, and as RonnieOP and Kisai point out, if an account gets flagged or banned, a person might be able to just make another account.

 

GoG's generous return window might be good for gamers, but it could repel publishers from releasing their games on GoG - especially new games.

 

GoG's customer and gamer-friendly positions are commendable, though. In addition to offering DRM-free products and their new generous return policy, they openly recognize that people own the games they purchase:

 

 

And they also used the word Customer instead of Consumer in their refund policy message:

 

"The latest update to our voluntary Refund Policy adds another piece to this customer-friendly experience."

 

That's important because the word Consumer serves as propaganda that aims to downplay customer interests and bias the customer-manufacturer relationship in a way that benefits the manufacturer at the expense of the customer. I've long made a conscious effort to avoid using the word Consumer except where it is part of a semi-official term, like "consumer rights groups". But even in those cases, I think I should just say "customer rights groups" or "product owner rights groups".

 

6 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

At the time (years ago), my proposal was to scale the return window to the game.  Developers would be responsible for labelling games with an estimated total playtime in hours, and the return window would be some percentage of this.  This would extend the window for big games that needed (and could afford) it, while shrinking it on games where it was excessive, solving the problem entirely.  One obvious potential issue is devs picking absurdly short times to effectively block people from refunding, but I believe that they would be held accountable by the market and people would not buy $20+ games that could be completed in 5 minutes.

The return window being a percentage of a game's total playtime is a good idea.

 

Quote

Of course, another way to (sort of) solve this problem is just to effectively remove the limit all together.  30 days is a very long time and if you haven't tried the game adequately by then you probably never will.  This is fantastic for gamers but obviously does open them up to the potential for abuse.  With that said though, people said the same when Steam implemented their policy, and I don't think it's really become an issue.  They said at the time they would monitor use of the system and catch obvious abusers, and while I can't tell if that has happened or not, I don't really see signs anywhere that abuse is rampant.  No one talks about it.  Perhaps this will be the same.  The fact is there is already enormous potential for GOG to be abused by people buying 1 copy and sharing it to everyone they know due to the lack of DRM, but despite this they have been and continue to be successful.  Yes, there are a lot of bad people out there, but perhaps not quite as many as it takes to ruin it for the rest of us.

GoG is actually barely profitable. According to their released financial report, in 2018 GoG made only $7,622.49 of profit.

 

 

 

GoG's new refund policy could be an attempt to grow their sales volume.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, Delicieuxz said:

[...]

 

GoG is actually barely profitable. According to their released financial report, in 2018 GoG made only $7,622.49 of profit.

 

That is by far the worst yearly profit I've ever heard of, but it is at least above zero lol which in my books qualifies as a success

[RonnieOP]

1 hour ago, Delicieuxz said:

 

 

GoG is actually barely profitable. According to their released financial report, in 2018 GoG made only $7,622.49 of profit.

 

 

 

GoG's new refund policy could be an attempt to grow their sales volume.

To be honest I dont think this is going to grow their sales.

 

People are picking steam/epic over GoG now even with their "bad" refund policies. So I dont see how this is going to draw more legit buyer in.

 

If im a young gamer and I dont have alot of money for games....This is something I would 100% exploit. Not even going to bother lying. Now that renting games isnt really an option. Buy a game, beat it in a month, get money back. repeat. Its perfect for someone who wants to play games without actually buying them. 

[JZStudios]

8 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

If they refund in 30 days no matter the playtime then people are 100% going to abuse it.

 

I get people are happy about this....but tbh its a dumb move.

 

It really shouldnt take you one month of playing a game to see if you like it or not.

 

This is going to be abused to all hell. Wouldnt surprise me if this policy doesnt make it a year due to abuse.

 

With this policy you can now buy a new game, beat it, refund it, and do it all over again.

And then they don't refund you for continuing to be an asshat. It's very simple. It's almost like they've actually thought about it.

 

7 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

And if you get flagged you make a new account.

 

Amazon has been flagging abusers for years and years now....doesnt stop them. And GoG isnt going to do as much work as amazon does to try and stop them.

 

Its going to attract a shit load of dishonest people. More then honest people i believe.

 

"Just buy it on gog and refund it" will be said on forums all over the place.

It's a digital good. Why even bother with that when those people can literally just go to (certain unnamed sites) and just straight Yar-Har it? Which they can, will, and do... do already, regardless of DRM. Hell, one of the Assassins Creed games recently had EVERY line of Denuvo manually removed from the game.

 

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

All it costs the abuser is one disposable credit card. Since the games are supposed to be DRM free, one could theoretically "buy everything" off gog in less than a day if they have the bandwidth for it.

I think the people over there are big brain enough to not refund a purchase of 30 games.

 

5 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

With all that said however, there is another method that's better than all of this.  It gives you unlimited time to test, while always being appropriately proportional to the game at hand so you see enough to know if you want it but not enough to spoil the full experience, is effectively impossible to abuse, and can work without money even changing hands!  Who else here remembers game demos and wonders what on earth happened to make them so rare when they are such an obviously smart concept that worked well for years and still does...

Mostly agreed. The generous overlords at Steam with their terrible 2 hour refund period also makes me still pinch pennies and not try out games. Meanwhile short games like Edith Finch or Ethan Carter I've still bought and I'm perfectly fine with the purchase, as were most people that bought it. I also haven't heard anything about the rampant misuse of Steam refunds, other than that time that one guy played a new Sonic game on stream, beat it in like 2 or 3 hours, absolutely hated it, and then refunded it. Which I still think is valid. If the game is that short AND you hate it, thus aren't ever going to play it again, I think that's a valid reason for a refund.

 

Anyways, as to demos, I've been told/read from a few different devs that demos are essentially another build of the game that they have to make, so they just don't anymore. BeamNG for example has a "tech demo" available for download that's so old it's on an entirely different engine and they straight up say it's not worth the time and resources to make a new one.

 

Oh, also there's a site called GameSessions that's legit, and lets you download the full games for an amout of trial time set by... presumably the publisher or developer, and then if you buy it they just give you the Steam key and it's already downloaded.

[JZStudios]

4 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

The best answer tbh is to start doing your research before buying. In 2020 with hundreds of thousands of different gaming youtubers, websites, etc you can find gameplay/reviews of basically any game. Be smart with your money and alot of times you wont even need a refund option.

To me, other than seeing that a game is generally favorably reviewed or maybe the first hour of gameplay, that's like watching a movie before deciding to go see it in theaters.

 

2 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

To be honest I dont think this is going to grow their sales.

 

People are picking steam/epic over GoG now even with their "bad" refund policies. So I dont see how this is going to draw more legit buyer in.

 

If im a young gamer and I dont have alot of money for games....This is something I would 100% exploit. Not even going to bother lying. Now that renting games isnt really an option. Buy a game, beat it in a month, get money back. repeat. Its perfect for someone who wants to play games without actually buying them. 

Yep, Xbox Game pass doesn't exist. Nor just Cap'n Jack Sparrowing them.

And once again, GOG reserves the right to refuse refunds.

[Delicieuxz]

2 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

To be honest I dont think this is going to grow their sales.

 

People are picking steam/epic over GoG now even with their "bad" refund policies. So I dont see how this is going to draw more legit buyer in.

 

If im a young gamer and I dont have alot of money for games....This is something I would 100% exploit. Not even going to bother lying. Now that renting games isnt really an option. Buy a game, beat it in a month, get money back. repeat. Its perfect for someone who wants to play games without actually buying them. 

We'll just have to wait and see what happens. GoG and CD Projeck is a great group of people and I hope they don't damage their relationships with other publishers by this move. If it does get exploited badly, maybe they'll change their course. If they ultimately deem the policy change to be positive for their and publishers' business, I'll be very happy and impressed.

[Andreas Lilja]

7 hours ago, aisle9 said:

Amazon only targets those who really abuse the system.

They're less tolerant than they used to be. Namely they started to have you pay return shipping, depending on why you're shipping it back.

[Andreas Lilja]

27 minutes ago, comander said:

I keep on hearing good things about GoG. 

If this keeps happening, I'll make them my go-to place to get games instead of Steam. 

Selection sucks.

[Tristerin]

I think I HAVE to buy games from GoG now.  Im glad those that will abuse this will be denied also, as Im sure there can only be so many purchases and refunds before something gets quite suspicious.

[JZStudios]

1 hour ago, Andreas Lilja said:

Selection sucks.

There's a decent selection of indie games. And of course the old ones that GOG keeps running.

[RonnieOP]

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

And then they don't refund you for continuing to be an asshat. It's very simple. It's almost like they've actually thought about it.

 

It's a digital good. Why even bother with that when those people can literally just go to (certain unnamed sites) and just straight Yar-Har it? Which they can, will, and do... do already, regardless of DRM. Hell, one of the Assassins Creed games recently had EVERY line of Denuvo manually removed from the game.

 

I think the people over there are big brain enough to not refund a purchase of 30 games.

 

 

From what is provided I dont see anything about a limit of how many refunds you can do in x amount of time. Do they have a policy on that? Maybe i missed it.

 

And even if they do, whats stopping someone from making another account and starting the cycle over again? If amazon and other giant corporations cant keep fraudsters away what makes you think that GoG will? They clearly dont have the resources.

 

True people can just torrent the game. But what if its an online game?

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

To me, other than seeing that a game is generally favorably reviewed or maybe the first hour of gameplay, that's like watching a movie before deciding to go see it in theaters.

 

Yep, Xbox Game pass doesn't exist. Nor just Cap'n Jack Sparrowing them.

And once again, GOG reserves the right to refuse refunds.

 

Xbox game pass costs money. We are talking about people who want to get things for free and abuse the system. And again sure they can torrent it. But why go through the risk of doing that when you can get a legit copy and just refund it?

 

Sure they have the right to refuse refunds. but when do they start doing that? after the first refund? after 5? And if the person is making a new account each time what are they going to do?

 

If you would rather buy a game instead of watching gameplay/reviews i mean thats on you. Personally I dont want to give shit games my time or money to begin with. And dont want to deal with the refund process either. Paying $10 to go see a movie or $4 to rent it is a lot different then if your spending 40-60 bucks on a game. If I wasted $10 on a movie ticket im not going to care much. If I waste $60 im going to care a lot.

 

I dont wish any ill will towards GoG. I like what they are doing. But as someone whos seen what people in the social engineering community can pull off im just being realistic on the possibilities here. This could hurt GoG a lot more then it will help.

[Bombastinator]

As it happens I just finished the last game I was playing.  I like this move enough to buy my next game there.  Question is, what should I buy?  Opinions?  Their big title seems to be cyberpunk 2077 which doesn’t seem useful right now, but I’m up for something I can play.  I notice vampire the masquerade is there.  That was an awesome game but I played it long ago wasteland remastered I finished too.  I like AAA single person (or at least non mmo) sandbox rpgs.  What do people suggest?

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, JZStudios said:

 

I think the people over there are big brain enough to not refund a purchase of 30 games.

 

There is almost certainly nobody overseeing refunds. Depending on the entire logistics chain, it might be impossible to refund anything without a detailed defect description since intangibles are considered consumed once sold. Gog may simply be pulling it out of their own revenue and deducting refunds against future sales on the same title.

 

2 hours ago, JZStudios said:

 

Anyways, as to demos, I've been told/read from a few different devs that demos are essentially another build of the game that they have to make, so they just don't anymore. BeamNG for example has a "tech demo" available for download that's so old it's on an entirely different engine and they straight up say it's not worth the time and resources to make a new one.

 

 

Demos are not cost effective. You have to essentially decide where to cut the game, and since 100% of 3D games need all their assets from the full game to even do a demo, there's no point making a demo of a 3D game. The same problem with 8-bit and 16-bit titles (NES/SNES/MD/etc), all the assets already exist, so the only difference between a full game and a demo is a flag somewhere in the code that says "if demo, stop game here"

 

Now, a proper demo (even commercial software demos have this issue) is to just not make it a technical demo. If you have a game title that is 10 chapters. You put the cut point at the end of Chapter 1, then go back through the game and put a few hooks in to make sure that "but you can do that in the full version" clues are dropped so people don't mistakenly think they're playing the full game. When the developers get to Chapter 2, they make sure the Demo/Chapter 1 can be patched to Chapter 2. Past that point every additional chapter is treated like DLC against the previous one.

 

With software, time-limited demos are basically all but completely useless. "feature demos" which are the full program, but the render output/saved files are watermarked and encrypted so they can't be used in the full version, which is fine if you're learning the program, but utterly sucks for people who want to see if product X or product Y is suitable to do something, since the software inter-operation is rendered useless. Ultimately the best solution for commercial software is in fact to take Adobe's cloud software route, and just have a perpetual trial mode so that the software's export features have watermarks in demo/trial mode, that way you buy it when you need it, and pause the license when you're not needing it (as most freelancers will tell you, they would rather have a perpetual license than a cloud license, or if they have to have a cloud license, they only want to pay for it when they're using the software, not for time they're not, which so far Adobe software costs as much as a perpetual license, per year, and that is basically not worth the cost if you only need it for a month, or are training on it.)

 

Unfortunately, with games, it's basically difficult to create a demo that can't be altered into the full game. So "demo" games really need to be a self contained mini-episode that you'd give away for free anyway.

 

For example, the Space Quest 6 Demo: https://wiw.org/~jess/sq6demodl.html vs the full game https://www.gog.com/game/space_quest_4_5_6 . The demo uses the assets from the full game, but only a small portion of it, the episode itself is entire original and not even referenced in the full game.

 

[JZStudios]

56 minutes ago, RonnieOP said:

True people can just torrent the game. But what if its an online game?

Then you need to use GOG Galaxy, unless it has private servers I'm pretty sure. I think the only multiplayer game I have is Dying Light and I'm pretty sure that requires the launcher to play online. And that's only co-op.

58 minutes ago, RonnieOP said:

Xbox game pass costs money. We are talking about people who want to get things for free and abuse the system. And again sure they can torrent it. But why go through the risk of doing that when you can get a legit copy and just refund it?

So does getting Starbucks every day, or Spotify. Yet people still pay for that. And again, there's also lots of people that'll just download shit illegally anyways.

Right now Xbox Game Pass lets you join for $1. Then it bumps up to $5. Even the cheapest of shit birds can afford that. This also applies to any form of video streaming, and yet Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. are all doing fine. It's also not like these shit birds are killing Amazon. Amazon is still wildly successful.

And honestly, making a new account to keep buying and refunding the game sounds like more of a hassle than just paying $15-30 and being the fuck done with it. And pirating isn't that hard. There's also frankly little risk.

1 hour ago, RonnieOP said:

If you would rather buy a game instead of watching gameplay/reviews i mean thats on you. Personally I dont want to give shit games my time or money to begin with. And dont want to deal with the refund process either. Paying $10 to go see a movie or $4 to rent it is a lot different then if your spending 40-60 bucks on a game. If I wasted $10 on a movie ticket im not going to care much. If I waste $60 im going to care a lot.

I don't know where you live where movies are still only $10. I spent $15 on Bayonetta, I'd still like to be able to spend it on something I'd actually enjoy, despite knowing before hand that it got rave reviews and that it was a spectacle brawler. Frankly, unless it was free I'm going to feel underwhelmed. It's nice that you don't have a problem flushing money away, but we aren't all Mr. Moneybags.

 

48 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

As it happens I just finished the last game I was playing.  I like this move enough to buy my next game there.  Question is, what should I buy?  Opinions?  Their big title seems to be cyberpunk 2077 which doesn’t seem useful right now, but I’m up for something I can play.  I notice vampire the masquerade is there.  That was an awesome game but I played it long ago wasteland remastered I finished too.  I like AAA single person (or at least non mmo) sandbox rpgs.  What do people suggest?

Have you tried Divinity Original Sin 2?

31 minutes ago, Kisai said:

There is almost certainly nobody overseeing refunds. Depending on the entire logistics chain, it might be impossible to refund anything without a detailed defect description since intangibles are considered consumed once sold. Gog may simply be pulling it out of their own revenue and deducting refunds against future sales on the same title.

Pretty sure even Steam has people overseeing refunds.

[RonnieOP]

6 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

snip.

I dont understand your point here. We are talking about people abusing the system. What does netflix, starbucks, and game pass have to do with any of this? Im not saying that legit buyers wont love this. Im saying its going to be abused. Theres no doubt about that. Maybe to you making a new account is too much hassle. but for many it wont be. It takes like 3 minutes to make an account. Systems like this have been abused for decades and will continue to be abused for decades to come.

 

And i have no clue how the hell you get the idea of "I have money to flush away" when you quoted me saying that I dont want to give shit games my time and money. how the shit you can call me "Mr Moneybags" when I said that I wouldnt be as upset wasting $10 on a movie ticket or $4 on a rental compared to $60 on a game. Do i want to waste $10? of course not. But thats a pill alot easier to swallow then $60 wasted. That whole statement was just dumb tbh. 

 

but anyways. this popped up on my youtube feed and it seems like some devs are really not happy about this and apparently were not even informed.

 

 

 

[Bombastinator]

24 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

Then you need to use GOG Galaxy, unless it has private servers I'm pretty sure. I think the only multiplayer game I have is Dying Light and I'm pretty sure that requires the launcher to play online. And that's only co-op.

So does getting Starbucks every day, or Spotify. Yet people still pay for that. And again, there's also lots of people that'll just download shit illegally anyways.

Right now Xbox Game Pass lets you join for $1. Then it bumps up to $5. Even the cheapest of shit birds can afford that. This also applies to any form of video streaming, and yet Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. are all doing fine. It's also not like these shit birds are killing Amazon. Amazon is still wildly successful.

And honestly, making a new account to keep buying and refunding the game sounds like more of a hassle than just paying $15-30 and being the fuck done with it. And pirating isn't that hard. There's also frankly little risk.

I don't know where you live where movies are still only $10. I spent $15 on Bayonetta, I'd still like to be able to spend it on something I'd actually enjoy, despite knowing before hand that it got rave reviews and that it was a spectacle brawler. Frankly, unless it was free I'm going to feel underwhelmed. It's nice that you don't have a problem flushing money away, but we aren't all Mr. Moneybags.

 

Have you tried Divinity Original Sin 2?

Pretty sure even Steam has people overseeing refunds.

Yeah, I got divinity 2.  

Spoiler

I rage quit.  It’s a fake open world game for classic e4 reasons.  Supposedly the only section that is pure stupid evil punishment mode is chapter 1 and after that it becomes a normal RPG.  I found I wasn’t willing to flagellate myself for 3 weeks just to play a video game.  I hear after that it’s pretty good, but it was too annoying to do.

 

[Thaldor]

6 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

-snip-

 

GoG is actually barely profitable. According to their released financial report, in 2018 GoG made only $7,622.49 of profit.

 

 

 

GoG's new refund policy could be an attempt to grow their sales volume.

GoG has never been the bread machine for CDP, more or less it has been a side-project and something they want to do for the community. IIRC they have been quite open on that they don't care how much profit GoG makes as long as they have CDPR money to sink into it and can keep the lights on. Their running costs have also been quite huge over the years because the way they have collected old games to the store has been to just get the developer/publisher to give them rights to modify and sell the game and then they handle making a distribution that works on modern systems (pre-configured DOSbox, some other third party emulator or even custom emulator for just that one game, just about anything it takes to make the game run and of course ripping the DRMs away). Not to even mentions their own projects within GoG like the Galaxy 2.0 launcher which probably took quite a lot to develope.

 

I have loved GoG since it launched and this is just great what they have now started. But the thing that really sparks joy in me in this is what other storefronts will do next because so far EU has been just OK with the 2 week - 2 hours model that Valve made after fighting with EU and Australia about refunds and now there's GoG which not only rised the bar but is now the only storefront that completely complies with EUs distance selling rules for general goods (except digital, consumeables and tons of others which are hard to return) which are basicly no question asked 30 day return with complete refund including shipping fees both ways. It would be fun to see if EU was to use GoG as example that digital storefronts can offer that 30 day refund window and go to war with Valve and others once again.

 

People will abuse this just like they abuse everything but with GoG I don't think they will care much (at least now that they currently have two well milking cows in their barn). Amount of fresh games will probably drop a lot because devs are devs and publishers think nothing else than money but in reality fresh games in GoG have been more like side-project of the side-project and main thing has always been the Good Old Games and as they have managed to get basicly every publisher behind them with their retro games which the publishers probably haven't cared for decades anyway, I don't believe GoG will change much on that front (if not EA decide they want to make money with Spore again which is highly improbable). Also there's that the games have been DRM free since beginning and it hasn't blown to their faces yet even when the whole industry were counting on it and saying that piracy will kill GoG before it even starts.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

11 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

And if you get flagged you make a new account.

 

Amazon has been flagging abusers for years and years now....doesnt stop them.

It also doesn't stop Amazon, nor it prompts a change of policy. So your own example would tell us this just works.

 

11 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

"Just buy it on gog and refund it" will be said on forums all over the place.

If a games is currently sold by GOG, you can just get a copy from someone else and play it with no issues, which is much simpler than refunding, getting flagged, making a new account, etc, etc. So I don't see how a refund policy could ever open them up to more abuse than their DRM-free policy (which, among other things, is the reason I buy from them, and not from anyone else).

[RonnieOP]

1 minute ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It also doesn't stop Amazon, nor it prompts a change of policy. So your own example would tell us this just works.

 

If a games is currently sold by GOG, you can just get a copy from someone else and play it with no issues, which is much simpler than refunding, getting flagged, making a new account, etc, etc. So I don't see how a refund policy could ever open them up to more abuse than their DRM-free policy (which, among other things, is the reason I buy from them, and not from anyone else).

Amazon has changed their policies though. Not saying its bad they changed them, but hey have changed them.

 

And im not just thinking about the games on their now. but games coming out in the future that may be on GoG.

 

Then there is the question on what it does for the devs and if they will want to continue putting their games on there. I mean imagine being an indy dev and getting a bunch of sales one day and then a month later they see money has come out of their accounts due to this.

 

Dont get me wrong im not upset GoG is doing this. I think 30 days is way too long personally, but thats not the point. Im just pointing out the same things alot of people and games sites are pointing out. This could be a nightmare. for everyone involved.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

Just now, RonnieOP said:

Dont get me wrong im not upset GoG is doing this. I think 30 days is way too long personally, but thats not the point. Im just pointing out the same things alot of people and games sites are pointing out. This could be a nightmare. for everyone involved.

We are just pointing out that people say this without much backing. Abuse will exist? Sure. "Abuse will make this a nightmare and we'll be cancelled in a year"? Needs to be substantiated.

Especially seeing as, as I told you, the "no DRM" policy is much simpler to abuse than the refund policy, yet here we are... 

[RonnieOP]

1 minute ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

We are just pointing out that people say this without much backing. Abuse will exist? Sure. "Abuse will make this a nightmare and we'll be cancelled in a year"? Needs to be substantiated.

Especially seeing as, as I told you, the "no DRM" policy is much simpler to abuse than the refund policy, yet here we are... 

I dont think anyone is saying what will happen for sure. We dont know.

 

It wont surprise me if this doesnt make it a full year tbh. Esp if GoG starts getting more non indy games. But im not going to say it will be changed for a fact in a year.

 

And considering the no DRM thing it makes me wonder why GoG is even doing this tbh.

 

[JZStudios]

16 minutes ago, RonnieOP said:

And considering the no DRM thing it makes me wonder why GoG is even doing this tbh.

Businesses rely on the average customer. The average customer will buy the product, be satisfied, and keep their product. Of course shit birds exist. As mentioned in the video you linked, of course people will take back empty wine bottles to Costco and say it gave them a headache. Or people that eat an entire meal at a restaurant and demand their money back. The amount of people that don't do that though far surpasses the people that do, and so much so that Costco hasn't changed its policies in 25 years while still being hugely profitable.

 

Considering the majority of comments are concerns about how it could be abused, and not people stating that they will indicates that people generally won't abuse the system.

[RonnieOP]

12 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

Businesses rely on the average customer. The average customer will buy the product, be satisfied, and keep their product. Of course shit birds exist. As mentioned in the video you linked, of course people will take back empty wine bottles to Costco and say it gave them a headache. Or people that eat an entire meal at a restaurant and demand their money back. The amount of people that don't do that though far surpasses the people that do, and so much so that Costco hasn't changed its policies in 25 years while still being hugely profitable.

 

Considering the majority of comments are concerns about how it could be abused, and not people stating that they will indicates that people generally won't abuse the system.

Whos going to comment saying "Oh hell yeah, im going to abuse this system"? lol.

 

Your right on the number of shit bags being lower then the legit buyer. But seeing as how GoGs customer base is fairly small to begin with a small percentage could mean a lot more to them.

 

Time will tell. Hopefully it doesnt do them any harm.

 

After giving it some thought though. I am really interested to see how the devs will react. I find it kind of weird that GoG didnt give them a heads up about it or ask for their input.

[Engineer.AI]

1 hour ago, RonnieOP said:

Whos going to comment saying "Oh hell yeah, im going to abuse this system"? lol.

 

Your right on the number of shit bags being lower then the legit buyer. But seeing as how GoGs customer base is fairly small to begin with a small percentage could mean a lot more to them.

 

Time will tell. Hopefully it doesnt do them any harm.

 

After giving it some thought though. I am really interested to see how the devs will react. I find it kind of weird that GoG didnt give them a heads up about it or ask for their input.

Spot on! GoG needed to do this ON LAUNCH imo. Just another routine example of the industry biting off more than it can chew.

~Engineer.AI