Players Seek 'No Man's Sky' Refunds, Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves (tweaktown.com)

thegarbz writes: As was covered previously on Slashdot the very hyped up game No Man's Sky was released to a lot of negative reviews about game-crashing bugs and poor interface choices. Now that players have had more time to play the game it has become clear that many of the features hyped by developers are not present in the game, and users quickly started describing the game as "boring".

Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."

In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."

Comments

Re:It's Sony - duh

[sjames]

That depends. If they find out at the end that a killer bug means you can't complete it, or if you try everything figuring that killer feature they advertised has to be unlocked only to find that it just isn't there., returning after 50 hours may be perfectly fair.

Re:Misleading Headline

[war4peace]

Here's where the 50 hours come from:
Sean Murray, the CEO of Hello Games (tarnished be his name), said that at the "center" there's a huge mystery waiting to be unraveled. It would take players many, many hours of gameplay to get there. Many players actually attempted this, only to find that there is literally nothing in the center. The only thing that's there is some cheesy music and a cutscene of stars and then you're thrown out into another galaxy to start from scratch. This is arguably the biggest Fuck You sent a player's way I've ever seen in a game.

People have't played 50 hours while gaining enjoyment, they played 50 hours hoping to gain enjoyment. It's like going to work for a week + overtime only to be told your salary is actually the chance to come back again Monday and work some more.

Re:50 hours of crap.

[lgw]

For those who have someone escaped the drama associated with NMS and want to learn what all the fuss is about, this review does a great job of explaining - not just listing the missing features, but showing the emotional impact it had on fans who were incredibly hyped for the game.

There are some scam games on Steam that are designed to last two hours to get past the refund limit.

No Man's Sky is one of these.

I think that may be accidental - at least, I don't credit the devs with the skill to cook that up. The problem here is that the game is missing nearly every promised feature, but there's no way to discover that until you leave the first planet. Then it all turns to shit. The timing, specifically, was likely a coincidence, but Hello Games definitely knew what they were shitting out.

Also, the game crashes frequently even on console, but it can go hours between crashes. For PC, we're used to that sort of shit, and while I think that's still worth a refund, you wouldn't get mass outrage. On the console OTOH, Just Works (TM) is the freaking point of console games.

Still, had the game not been missing almost every promised feature, I think the player base would have been content to wait for a patch to fix the crashes.