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

[JZStudios]

1 hour ago, RonnieOP said:

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

The same people that literally say they do/will/are pirating games. The only games I've gotten that way are Dirt, Richard Burns Rally, and Driver San Francisco. None of which you can actually buy. Or I guess like, Midnight Club 3 and Burnout 3 for the PS2 because I had them on Xbox.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

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

You'd be amazed and how quickly people will admit to theft.

 

To the average person, stealing a game that doesn't involve stealing the physical media is the same as taking a photo of a photo. No big deal, they don't see the connection between their action and the consequences.

 

Like, piracy will never be "solved". Even if you can get the game for free, people will still steal it. They want THAT version, not the no-effort to get version.

 

And to be honest, games are probably the only form of entertainment where DRM actively destroys replaying games by design. They don't want you playing those old games with no microtransactions, subscriptions or DLC. No they want you to buy the same game over and over and over again, every time you get a new pc, console, mobile phone, and keep nickel and diming you as long as it's profitable to them, and then if it's not profitable enough they will just sunset the game, making it impossible to play, and your "investment" is gone instantly. 

 

If I'm being honest, I would willingly trade going back to the 90's with the low-resolution graphics, wave-table class music, and 30 hours of gameplay, over current generations of games with only 10 hours of gameplay and the rest of the game exists only in loot box gambling.

 

Of course those old games are also horribly ruined by the internet. Where you used to have to try and solve puzzles, now you just google a guide or look up a LP video. It's pretty much impossible to make a 90's style game now without releasing it piecemeal so people aren't immediately spoiled on it.

[maartendc]

Very nice to see, I love GOG and buy games from them on occasion.

 

However, I wish they had a wider selection of new games. Most new games don't appear on their platform. They are more heavily indie focused and focused on old games. Which is fine, but I cannot buy most new AAA titles from them...

[xAcid9]

1 hour ago, maartendc said:

Which is fine, but I cannot buy most new AAA titles from them...

How many AAA games released w/o any sort of DRM like The Witcher series?

[JZStudios]

8 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

How many AAA games released w/o any sort of DRM like The Witcher series?

Cyberpunk... when it releases.

[Xiee]

As much as I like Steam, this is one reason why I'm buying Cyberpunk on GOG. I want them to get all the money. Good on you CDPR.

[vanished]

2 hours ago, Xiee said:

As much as I like Steam, this is one reason why I'm buying Cyberpunk on GOG. I want them to get all the money. Good on you CDPR.

I would honestly strive to buy everything you can through GoG.  Who doesn't want a DRM free version?  Of course, as someone already mentioned, their selection isn't a parallel of Steam by any means so this won't be possible in many cases, but whenever it is, I think it should be the first choice personally.

[GDRRiley]

I'll be buying anything I can on GOG now. at this point I'm tired of steams shitty refund policy and the slow changes to steam.

[JZStudios]

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

I'll be buying anything I can on GOG now. at this point I'm tired of steams shitty refund policy and the slow changes to steam.

And with Galaxy 2.0 you can launch all your games from every platform, have your pointless achievement and time played stats, and message all your friends on other platforms. You can even auto close the other game launchers when you exit the game. So you don't even have to use Steams bad UI.

[GDRRiley]

6 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

And with Galaxy 2.0 you can launch all your games from every platform, have your pointless achievement and time played stats, and message all your friends on other platforms. You can even auto close the other game launchers when you exit the game. So you don't even have to use Steams bad UI.

yep, while I haven't linked them all I will soon.

[Andreas Lilja]

3 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I would honestly strive to buy everything you can through GoG.  Who doesn't want a DRM free version?  Of course, as someone already mentioned, their selection isn't a parallel of Steam by any means so this won't be possible in many cases, but whenever it is, I think it should be the first choice personally.

Some Steam features are pretty much necessary. 

 

For example I'm not sure exactly how the mods are going to work for Rimworld, which has a workshop. 

 

Have they started supporting achievements on a wide scale?

[Thaldor]

49 minutes ago, Andreas Lilja said:

Some Steam features are pretty much necessary. 

 

For example I'm not sure exactly how the mods are going to work for Rimworld, which has a workshop. 

 

Have they started supporting achievements on a wide scale?

All workshop mods will work and all achievements work on all "platforms"(except uPlay but I just use GoG, Steam and uPlay) (Galaxy 2.0 just runs Steam in the background when game is started/running and uses APIs for friends list and game library sync). Although you cannot add/remove/modify workshop mods with Galaxy and for that you need to startup Steam. Currently the only problem I have found (I don't generally use workshop because in all of the games that I like modded Nexus has had far better selection of mods and in those workshop seems a bit lacking and restricted) is that SteamVR is currently not working well with Galaxy 2.0 mainly because (even if the game itself would when started from .exe or shortcut) it doesn't wait for SteamVR to start before starting the game and closes it when the game.exe closes.

[JZStudios]

10 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

All workshop mods will work and all achievements work on all "platforms"(except uPlay but I just use GoG, Steam and uPlay)

I don't know about that. It's not a very good game, but This War of Mine has Steam workshop and proper mod support, but since Steam workshop is a closed and encrypted environment you can't access any of it. As such This War of Mine on Epic and GOG has very little mods since most are on workshop.

 

At least, I think @Andreas Lilja was asking about the games from GOG. Otherwise it just launches the Steam version with all the mods n such.

[JZStudios]

On 2/27/2020 at 8:46 PM, RonnieOP said:

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

[Bombastinator]

Think I’m going to buy pathfinder on GoG.   The  only complaints about it seem to be “it’s too faithful to the game and I never understood the game”. Not a problem I have.

[LAwLz]

Love how people are so pussy whipped by large companies these days that they boo a move that benefits them. 

Quote

A company that does something good for me instead of just kicking me in my teeth? What is happening? No, stop treating me like a decent human being! I want to keep being abused by shitty companies! 

 

[Bombastinator]

I just bought pathfinder kingmaker from GoG and am trying to download it now.  It wasn’t the game I was going to buy (my suspicion is it would have been borderlands 3) but a company behaving like they claim here is a “shut up and take my money” situation.  Pathfinder also looks like it will be fun.  Mentioned it to a friend who wanted to find an old space game called “frontier” Which they apparently do not have.  Anyone familiar with it and what I could suggest to the guy?

[xAcid9]

5 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I just bought pathfinder kingmaker from GoG and am trying to download it now.  It wasn’t the game I was going to buy (my suspicion is it would have been borderlands 3) but a company behaving like they claim here is a “shut up and take my money” situation.  Pathfinder also looks like it will be fun. 

I really enjoyed Kingmaker, hopefully Divinity Original Sin 2 will get on sale later this year. 

[mr moose]

22 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Love how people are so pussy whipped by large companies these days that they boo a move that benefits them. 

 

Who's booing it?  People saying they think people will abuse the new option is not booing anything.

[Bombastinator]

26 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

I really enjoyed Kingmaker, hopefully Divinity Original Sin 2 will get on sale later this year. 

I wasn’t fond of that game.  I understand a large part of the game is enduring chapter one in order to play the rest of the game.  I came to the conclusion that no game could possibly be good enough to make that worth while though.

[Bombastinator]

26 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Who's booing it?  People saying they think people will abuse the new option is not booing anything.

The question will be will they make more money from increased sales than they lose in abuse?  They could also do it like amazon does.  Track the serious abusers and full ban them.  I’m waiting for places like Walmart target and amazon to start sharing that sort of information.  That one could run out really ugly long term.  Abuse the heck out of a return policy and suddenly you can’t buy anything anywhere.

[xAcid9]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I wasn’t fond of that game.  I understand a large part of the game is enduring chapter one in order to play the rest of the game.  I came to the conclusion that no game could possibly be good enough to make that worth while though.

DOS2? That game gave me mixed/bad 1st impression as well until i gave it another try. 

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, xAcid9 said:

DOS2? That game gave me mixed/bad 1st impression as well until i gave it another try. 

Yeah.  I understand the phrase “it’s an e4 game” is enough to describe the phenomena.

[mr moose]

8 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The question will be will they make more money from increased sales than they lose in abuse?  They could also do it like amazon does.  Track the serious abusers and full ban them.  I’m waiting for places like Walmart target and amazon to start sharing that sort of information.  That one could run out really ugly long term.  Abuse the heck out of a return policy and suddenly you can’t buy anything anywhere.

 

Who knows? GOG aren't exactly making a killing at the moment so I think the ability to make profit is going to come down to how many of their current customers are willing to abuse the system to the point of being permanently banned in one fashion or another.  If the earlier figures of $7K profit is true then they don't have much buffer for taking risks.

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

 

Who knows? GOG aren't exactly making a killing at the moment so I think the ability to make profit is going to come down to how many of their current customers are willing to abuse the system to the point of being permanently banned in one fashion or another.  If the earlier figures of $7K profit is true then they don't have much buffer for taking risks.

They actually currently have probably the biggest buffer there can be. Even if the GoG isn't making huge profits CDP has CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most sold games in 2019 even while it's still only in pre-order, that most likely is huge sums of profit even if they have put few extra gears on the development to meet some build-up hype and exceed some expectations. Not to add the huge sales spike of the Witcher 3 after the Netflix-series came which was completely only profit for CDP.

 

More likely I would say that GoG is trying this out because they are doing so well they have the money to make huge mistakes. They even might have done this just to shake up the markets and get more discussion going around how badly digital platforms handle refunds by putting in place an example of extreme pro-customer policy and hoping that few consumer officials and other authorities take a note of it. Like in the past year we have seen quite a bad examples of how game industry handles refunds (*cough cough* Fallout 76 *cough cough* somewhat now Warcraft 3 Reforged *cough cough*) so, it's not really a surprise that there would be players who would try to push the whole field to better way by doing something drastic and CDP is rather known to go few extra steps just because the want to do it for the community (IIRC few retro games they have have been given to them, not by the publishers or studios, but by their original developers who have managed to keep some rights over them and they actually reach out for the original developers to get some extra contents besides the games, it's not much but it's far more than Steam and others offer even with extra fees, giving only a manual for a game is already quite a much today). More or less it was more likely that GoG would pull some stunts this year to burn some of those CDPR profits and probably this is it, if this goes well and doesn't blow to the CDPs face and they are left with even more money, I would guess something else will follow, after all now they have money to tryout some crazy ideas how to grow their userbase.