Nintendo(eShop), Valve(Steam), Sony(PS4 Shop), and EA(Origin) reported in Norway for breaching European Right to Withdrawl consumer law

[Misanthrope]

40 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

So, EU wants these stores to allow consumers to return electronic products within 14 days... How many people could win single player campaigns in those 14 days and still be able to return?

That's not a concern for a consumer: The only reason publishers gamble with shorter campaigns is precisely because they know they can get away with this because of the difficulties to return the product.

 

Sorry but all short games need to either get cheaper so players feel it was justified or just fucking die.

[ItsMitch]

8 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Sorry but all short games need to either get cheaper so players feel it was justified or just fucking die.

rip indie developers then

[AlTech]

56 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

rip indie developers then

Yeah. Indie devs already aren't making great money on PC.

[ARikozuM]

4 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Yeah. Indie devs already aren't making great money on PC.

The good ones are. Unfortunately, Steam is letting just any developer publish to their platform for the longest time. Really bad horror games come to mind, an immense dislike ratio, and yet they stay available. 

 

It's especially terrible when all of the "thumbs up" reviews are negative. 

[AlTech]

16 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

The good ones are.

I've heard directly from one or more indie devs who sell on Steam (some also sell on Console) and the one or two that sold on Console sold wayyyy better on Console than Steam. The ones that sold exclusively on Steam sold some units but weren't printing stacks of money from it if you know what I mean.

16 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

It's especially terrible when all of the "thumbs up" reviews are negative. 

Yeah and review bombing and all kinds of tactics like that are quite terrible. But even Total Biscuit and Jim Sterling have said that the biggest problem with Steam is how hard it is for good new titles to be discovered on the platform.

[Misanthrope]

16 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I've heard directly from one or more indie devs who sell on Steam (some also sell on Console) and the one or two that sold on Console sold wayyyy better on Console than Steam. The ones that sold exclusively on Steam sold some units but weren't printing stacks of money from it if you know what I mean.

Yeah and review bombing and all kinds of tactics like that are quite terrible. But even Total Biscuit and Jim Sterling have said that the biggest problem with Steam is how hard it is for good new titles to be discovered on the platform.

This is simple: Sony and Microsoft actually curate the content and don't let crap games from crap devs that sue their critics on their platform.

 

Steam desperately needs curation and not just from it's own users. Doesn't changes the fact that overall, good indie games often gather enough good faith to have pretty decent sales and support. People just shouldn't expect any piece of RPG maker shit thrown together with free or stolen assets to make them any money.

[Okjoek]

The only time I ever refunded a game was on Steam this one time and they accepted even though I spent a little over two hours in game. My reasoning I gave them was simply that the game was difficult to play on a keyboard (which I use) as opposed to controllers. I can't remember what it was, some sort of music game.

[Guest The Viking]

54 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Yeah. Indie devs already aren't making great money on PC.

depends on your niche. Indie tycoons are still making great money. I've worked with the dev from Mashinky, Jan Zeleny (super nice guy btw!), and he has said things are going well with over 28K copies sold of his game (which i recommend 100% if interested in these kind of games https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/ )

 

other devs seem to be quite successfull too, such as Rise of Industry. I'm keeping my eye on "Voxel Tycoon", community for it is already huge even before the game is out.

 

I guess for the average indie dev who's making another game like the 100 other available, yeah, it must suck.

[asus killer]

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

 

This is going to end badly for consumers IMO, there's no way these companies are going to like the things the EU have done recently. I wouldn't be surprised to see them split their business and operate Europe/Australia and ROW branches where ROW get cheaper games with no consumer protection while Europeans get protection but at an increased cost.

you already have 2 year warranty in EU and 1 in US and there was no problem. All this big companies already have separate business for different zones and all countries have different regulations, like warning stickers for age or safety standards.

Sony has different marketing, regulation departments, etc... for EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa for example

[Thaldor]

At least Steam is already splitted to multiple regions. Even EU is in two different regions. Although only for prices, which one time caused a lot of crying from devs when EU2 (or EU1, which one was cheaper) and RU region users bought a ton of games and sold them through G2A, Kinguin and others for more than they paid for but less than they costed in the more expensive EU region and US. This caused Valve to bind games per region (you cannot buy a key from RU region and use it in EU1/US region). Probably every "wiser than potato" platform does this already just because even in the EU it would hurt the sales if you offered a game for 60€ everywhere because while it's relatively trivial price in somewhere like Norway, Germany, Finland and so on, that's around months salary in countries like Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia and so on (drawed example countries from my memory, if some are wrong, sorry, but you get the point there are "richer" and "poorer" countries where people can pay very differently).

 

So, shouldn't be that hard to tend to the different laws in different areas/countries when they already have systems build to tend the different buying power in different areas.

 

What comes to that this could hurt indie developers, I think Steams curating hurts them more. Allowing anyone to buy their way to the store and having "curators" that are basicly just reviewers isn't really the best growing ground today in the age of assett flipping and ripping off. There's so much crap that the gold just falls to the bottom without having luck to be picked up by some big YouTubers or just getting fanbase bigger than the Chinese bot army that generates "good" reviews to he crap games. Only real thing that Valve could do would be something along the lines of giving curators or the "super-curators" (like Jim Sterling, TotalBisquit and others who have been even asked to contribute to develope Steam as platform) some kind of power to actually curate the platform. As example, there probably isn't a single crap game that Sterling doesn't have and his fans even provide him with almost every crap game that is published just so he would do Jimpressions out of it and cures it to the lowest hell, I don't think there's that many better "gatekeepers" and system where like 2-3 "super-curators" and/or X amount of normal curators vote the game to be assett flip or just so crap that it doesn't deserve to be on the platform, the developer would be given a warning to get their stuff together and provide acctual game or GTFO. This is what others are doing (EA and Ubishit-soft just release their own games on their platforms, but Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are extremely picky what they let in and actually go through everything so no crap gets in). At the moment Steam is pile of *cough* for indie developers, which is why I recommend building your fanbase first and then releasing the game in Steam, I know that if the indie developer is skillful enough to make a great game, (s)he is wise enough to build up a strategy to make it successful.

[Brooksie359]

9 hours ago, MyName13 said:

So a company could have HQ at some sh!thole and tell everyone that they have to follow their laws?

 

But why are kids playing these 18+ games?Isn't that the main issue?Can you name any games with lootboxes that have no violence or any content not suitable to kids?

 

 

Hearhtstone. I mean alot of these games are rated t for teen which is still under the 18 plus required for gambling.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

9 hours ago, AresKrieger said:

Honestly I don't know how it is possible to comply with every law from every country if you sell software online,

The same way multinationals who sell products offline do.

9 hours ago, AresKrieger said:

frankly I'd just not bother and put some disclaimer that we are a company from country X and are only subject to their laws, international sales are at the users discretion

Yeah, that's not how it works. Coca-Cola doesn't get to state "we are a US company and are only subject to their laws, buy Coca-Cola in India at your own discretion". They may try, but the end result will be no Coke sold in India.

And, more generally, people or companies don't get to re-write laws by placing disclaimers. It doesn't matter what they say and where they say it, only what the laws say.

 

[Ryujin2003]

7 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

That's not a concern for a consumer: The only reason publishers gamble with shorter campaigns is precisely because they know they can get away with this because of the difficulties to return the product.

 

Sorry but all short games need to either get cheaper so players feel it was justified or just fucking die.

 

7 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

rip indie developers then

 

@SC2Mitch, that was my initial concern. I wasn't worried about AAA titles with garbage single player campaigns. Some games have some extent of replayability such as This War of Mine or Party Hard, but there are some other indie games that are super short, and that is totally fine! Gotta start somewhere. But I don't think it's fair if people are able to play through to the end and then refund it.

 

But, I could also try and play through Mass Effect 3 with 14 days and return it. Or play though the Assassins Creed franchise, God of War, Killzone, Halo, etc... The 2 hours limit should be enough to taste it and see if you like it. 14 days should be I got it, but decided I didn't really want to purchase it. Or played for <2 hours and decided it wasn't really that interesting of a topic.

 

I think most titles that "gamble" on single player games care more about the MP aspect. And I generally refuse to purchase a title that doesn't have a single player aspect. I don't like being forced to play with others.

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, Ryujin2003 said:

 

 

@SC2Mitch, that was my initial concern. I wasn't worried about AAA titles with garbage single player campaigns. Some games have some extent of replayability such as This War of Mine or Party Hard, but there are some other indie games that are super short, and that is totally fine! Gotta start somewhere. But I don't think it's fair if people are able to play through to the end and then refund it.

 

But, I could also try and play through Mass Effect 3 with 14 days and return it. Or play though the Assassins Creed franchise, God of War, Killzone, Halo, etc... The 2 hours limit should be enough to taste it and see if you like it. 14 days should be I got it, but decided I didn't really want to purchase it. Or played for <2 hours and decided it wasn't really that interesting of a topic.

 

I think most titles that "gamble" on single player games care more about the MP aspect. And I generally refuse to purchase a title that doesn't have a single player aspect. I don't like being forced to play with others.

No: 2 hours isn't enough for you to run into some game breaking bugs at times. It's a shit policy most people praise because it was better than Valve's previous "LOL Fuck you" policy on returns.

 

But honestly in case you needed me to reiterate yes: I do think that if you make an indie game that can be finished in like 2 or 3 days and you charge 20 bucks or more for it then you probably should either make the experience more compelling or the price more reasonable. People made this same argument saying that some indie games could be completed in under the 2 hours and people actually gave pause.

 

Seriously? You want to charge for a 2 hours fucking experience and not expect to get burned by returns?

 

Sorry to say but some indie games have had it too fucking easy: Steam is clear evidence that a lot of them need to fucking die they offer terrible value for the money and only exists because of Valve's shit consumer policies.

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, Misanthrope said:

No: 2 hours isn't enough for you to run into some game breaking bugs at times. It's a shit policy most people praise because it was better than Valve's previous "LOL Fuck you" policy on returns.

 

But honestly in case you needed me to reiterate yes: I do think that if you make an indie game that can be finished in like 2 or 3 days and you charge 20 bucks or more for it then you probably should either make the experience more compelling or the price more reasonable. People made this same argument saying that some indie games could be completed in under the 2 hours and people actually gave pause.

 

Seriously? You want to charge for a 2 hours fucking experience and not expect to get burned by returns?

 

Sorry to say but some indie games have had it too fucking easy: Steam is clear evidence that a lot of them need to fucking die they offer terrible value for the money and only exists because of Valve's shit consumer policies.

If there is a game breaking bug you can still appeal for a refund if I remember correctly so I really think that's a non issue. 14 days is a long time for a return and basically makes it very easy to just play to your hearts content and then refund it after you are done.

[Misanthrope]

25 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

If there is a game breaking bug you can still appeal for a refund if I remember correctly so I really think that's a non issue. 14 days is a long time for a return and basically makes it very easy to just play to your hearts content and then refund it after you are done.

1) It isn't a non-issue since Steam can arbitrarily decide not to process the refund. Only the time based returns are processed without intervention on their end so you're at the whim of some underpaid employee that might review your claim and decide 'This isn't a popular enough problem being reported' and deny your claim.

 

2) Again you're not really offering a positive argument about why 14 days is too long: you are just asserting modern games are short and probably take half that time on average to complete.

 

This is just describing modern games: this isn't asserting why this is a good thing or reasonable it's just describing that it is and henceforth, it cannot possibly be any other way and we should just adjust our expectations and our laws accordingly.

 

Sorry but that's just ridiculous to me: I grew up on a time where videogames actually used to provide weeks and even months worth of playtime for a person playing a handful of hours daily. We actually used to get a lot of content for our money. As games started getting more popular they also got flashier and prettier but actually less complex mechanically and story/plot-wise. This has slowly subverted your expectations to ridiculously low bars of value where resources are quite frankly wasted by publisher.

 

So are you sure you want to listen to publishers and side with them on this trends to encourage the ridiculously short window of just 2 hours? Because if it was up to them we wouldn't have single player games at all by now. We wouldn't even have any kind of writers or voice actors on the teams it would just be a bunch of artists coding neat looking stuff for you to pay microtransactions towards and the actual meat of the game is replaced by fucking nothing: Just a "sandbox" game with a bunch of stupid fucking towers for you to discover without any point or worst, just some random objectives for you to just shoot up players in a combat area.

 

Fuck the most popular games right now are battle royale: there's nothing done on the devs end other than saying 'here are some ground rules like you start without weapons and the map gets smaller, now go waste time'

 

I hope this paints a picture somehow and realize why pushback against anti-consumer laws and enforcement is always against your best interest.

[Brooksie359]

7 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

1) It isn't a non-issue since Steam can arbitrarily decide not to process the refund. Only the time based returns are processed without intervention on their end so you're at the whim of some underpaid employee that might review your claim and decide 'This isn't a popular enough problem being reported' and deny your claim.

 

2) Again you're not really offering a positive argument about why 14 days is too long: you are just asserting modern games are short and probably take half that time on average to complete.

 

This is just describing modern games: this isn't asserting why this is a good thing or reasonable it's just describing that it is and henceforth, it cannot possibly be any other way and we should just adjust our expectations and our laws accordingly.

 

Sorry but that's just ridiculous to me: I grew up on a time where videogames actually used to provide weeks and even months worth of playtime for a person playing a handful of hours daily. We actually used to get a lot of content for our money. As games started getting more popular they also got flashier and prettier but actually less complex mechanically and story/plot-wise. This has slowly subverted your expectations to ridiculously low bars of value where resources are quite frankly wasted by publisher.

 

So are you sure you want to listen to publishers and side with them on this trends to encourage the ridiculously short window of just 2 hours? Because if it was up to them we wouldn't have single player games at all by now. We wouldn't even have any kind of writers or voice actors on the teams it would just be a bunch of artists coding neat looking stuff for you to pay microtransactions towards and the actual meat of the game is replaced by fucking nothing: Just a "sandbox" game with a bunch of stupid fucking towers for you to discover without any point or worst, just some random objectives for you to just shoot up players in a combat area.

 

Fuck the most popular games right now are battle royale: there's nothing done on the devs end other than saying 'here are some ground rules like you start without weapons and the map gets smaller, now go waste time'

 

I hope this paints a picture somehow and realize why pushback against anti-consumer laws and enforcement is always against your best interest.

I can finish the entire witcher 3 story in 14 days and that is one of my all time favorite games. Saying that a game is bad just because it can be played in 14 days is kinda dumb. It shouldn't take you 14 days to figure out if you like a game. You say it is in my best interest to support such laws but I would have to say that's a very simple way to look at things. I think a law like that is unfair to game developers and regardless of whether it is against or for my interest I wouldn't support it. If you can play a game for 14 days for free people will do it regardless if the game has more than 14 days worth of content. 

[Yoinkerman]

Doesn't valve funnel billions of dollars through Luxembourg as a tax haven and as such would need to comply with eu law?

[GoldenLag]

12 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

Norway was never part of the EU and will never join.  They have a deal to trade with the EU, but they make too much money off the North Sea via oil.

Its not entirely the north sea oil that makes us not wanting to join the EU. Among them is that if we join the agricultural market would collapse as we cant compete with any european farmer. Our stricter rules on some things like pestazides wouldnt work out. Also we use a ton of electricity and joining would increase the cost 5-fold (its an increase. I dont actually know the exact number) also the general market for Norwegian companies would dissapear as they can nolonger compete. Note: the fishing industry rivals the oil industry. We arent 100% dependant on oil as that would actually make us poorer. 

 

A bit of a rant

tl;dr Norway would be worse of in the EU unlike britainn whuch would be better off

[Xander Cousins]

18 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

This is simple: Sony and Microsoft actually curate the content and don't let crap games from crap devs that sue their critics on their platform.

 Logan Paul and the suicide forest was a game released in the xbox market........ 

[Misanthrope]

2 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

I can finish the entire witcher 3 story in 14 days and that is one of my all time favorite games. Saying that a game is bad just because it can be played in 14 days is kinda dumb. It shouldn't take you 14 days to figure out if you like a game. You say it is in my best interest to support such laws but I would have to say that's a very simple way to look at things. I think a law like that is unfair to game developers and regardless of whether it is against or for my interest I wouldn't support it. If you can play a game for 14 days for free people will do it regardless if the game has more than 14 days worth of content. 

People speed run games all of the time. People with a bit of mental issues can play 12 hours per day as well.

 

This doesn't means that anybody who's a reasonable fucking human being would return the Witcher 3 after 13 days of playing it every waking our because they managed to absorb absolutely all it has to offer, and even then I doubt they could.

 

But please feel free to read my other posts on the thread where I state how there's enough good will on the part of players for good indie games to do well even if they're short, provided their price is reasonable and the experience they offer is memorable. If not well I just restated it so there you go.

 

In fact shall we forget how the Witcher 3 is precisely the kind of game you can basically choose not to pay for at all since it has been available in its entirety on a completely DRM free format since day 1? There's been torrents of it since day one and you don't even need one but anybody with a GOG account can just give you a copy of it and it will work, let you update and let you play basically everything and you wouldn't have to pay a single cent or fear any repercussions from doing so.

 

Yet it has done very well.

 

This argument of "people would just return games they finish too quickly" is basically a repackaged "if pirate copies exist they diminish our sales!" which is basically a flawed argument proven wrong by many different games over the years where even indie games have managed great success knowing there's pirate versions of them available with ease.

 

Except now there's no moral justification whatsoever to support the publisher's stance: we're talking about people we can verify already paid for the game but Publishers are so insecure about the crap they know they're pushing they don't want us to be able to have 14 days to decide "Yeah, this game is a fucking rip off"

[Misanthrope]

6 minutes ago, Alex Colson said:

 Logan Paul and the suicide forest was a game released in the xbox market........ 

I am going to go out on a limb and say that while a huge oversight, it's probably more functional and entertaining than the games Digital Homicide was selling on Steam prior to Jim Sterling calling them out.

 

If anything you have managed to prove an exception to the rule, not a common trend like you can find on Steam.

[Brooksie359]

3 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

People speed run games all of the time. People with a bit of mental issues can play 12 hours per day as well.

 

This doesn't means that anybody who's a reasonable fucking human being would return the Witcher 3 after 13 days of playing it every waking our because they managed to absorb absolutely all it has to offer, and even then I doubt they could.

 

But please feel free to read my other posts on the thread where I state how there's enough good will on the part of players for good indie games to do well even if they're short, provided their price is reasonable and the experience they offer is memorable. If not well I just restated it so there you go.

 

In fact shall we forget how the Witcher 3 is precisely the kind of game you can basically choose not to pay for at all since it has been available in its entirety on a completely DRM free format since day 1? There's been torrents of it since day one and you don't even need one but anybody with a GOG account can just give you a copy of it and it will work, let you update and let you play basically everything and you wouldn't have to pay a single cent or fear any repercussions from doing so.

 

Yet it has done very well.

 

This argument of "people would just return games they finish too quickly" is basically a repackaged "if pirate copies exist they diminish our sales!" which is basically a flawed argument proven wrong by many different games over the years where even indie games have managed great success knowing there's pirate versions of them available with ease.

 

Except now there's no moral justification whatsoever to support the publisher's stance: we're talking about people we can verify already paid for the game but Publishers are so insecure about the crap they know they're pushing they don't want us to be able to have 14 days to decide "Yeah, this game is a fucking rip off"

I really could care less if it affects sales. People don't just get to play for 14 days and return the game. Research the game before you buy and take the first 2 hours to decide if you like it. You should be able to decide by then. If people want to go and play the game for free they can pirate but they shouldn't be able to just be able to do it legally through some b.s. return policy. Again you shouldn't be able to play a game for 14 days for eventually free. People would 100% abuse it.

[Misanthrope]

26 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I really could care less if it affects sales.

Great, then you really could care less about consumer rights which is entirely about sales. We're done here.

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Great, then you really could care less about consumer rights which is entirely about sales. We're done here.

I care about consumer rights. I just also think the developers have rights as well. I mean having a law requiring a 14 day return policy with no game play time limit is excessive and doesn't protect consumers an appreciable amount more than the 2 hour policy. It just opens the door for abuse which I think is not cool. Having protection for consumers is important but steams current policy is good enough to protect consumers while also protecting developers as well. I mean the whole point about people abusing the system doesn't matter because it doesn't affect sales is dumb. Just because it doesn't affect sales doesn't mean it should be allowed. It's the principal of it. If you don't pay for the game you shouldn't be able to play it for an extended period of time.