Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
Who would ever buy from Sony again, they've bungled many a product. BetaMax, MemoryCard, UMD, MiniDisc, BMG Rootkit, PS3 OtherOS, PS Vita, PSN hacks and pretty much all of their products are more expensive and have less features than competitors.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
...are Hello Games and Sony. They both knew they had a steaming turd of a game, they released it for full price anyway and expected people to just put up with it.
At least Valve has the integrity to do the right thing, refund players their money for a game that is broken, has none of the features its now-secluded big mouth Sean Murray claimed and if it were fixed, if it were bug free, it would still be a title that would normally go for free-to-play for PSN subscribers.
Really starting to re-think whether or not I'll be buying a console for gaming in the future...
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/...
A walking simulator on 18 million planets.
It's not surprising anyone wants their money back. It's also kind of hard to see how anyone "Stole" the content unless it was the same planet 18 million times.
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've gotten huge playtimes on some games because I honestly fell asleep while it was running, so it racked up a ton of hours even though I wasn't actually doing anything in the game.
Thanks for reminding us all why we should never buy Sony products.
If you don't want customers demanding a refund, maybe you should consider making better products instead of the half baked shite you seem to produce.
It takes about 50 hours to realize the features they promised aren't there. The "universe" is so big you continue to give it a chance, thinking you'll come across the things they promised later.
I haven't been a gamer for well over a decade (except whenever a new Civ comes out - when you lose me for a couple of weeks - a tradition since the first Civ) so I don't know if things have changed significantly, but is 50 hours of play time currently considered a lot? Especially with a game described as giving you an infinite procedural universe to explore? But in any case, if he is the *former* Sony director why would this guy's quotes be part of the news story?
Also, if the other post I read where two people tried to meet and found out the game "universe" is not common/simultaneous among players, which was what was promised, I'd think that makes a huge enough difference to warrant a refund... I mean, the developers themselves had said it would take quite some time for you to meet someone due to the size of the game universe, so if after 1000 hours of trying you find out they were lying and you couldn't meet players, not only should you get a refund but also perhaps some compensation for the time lost in the futile attempt?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
if it took you 50 hours to figure out a feature wasn't there, then what's the problem. how many games start you off with the top of the line weapons, armor, vehicles, etc?
With that kind of game supposedly based on exploration, you have to invest quite some time to find out that no, there's nothing to do here. 50h might be stretching out a bit, but even 20-30 hours of gameplay should not be enough to find everything if the game was not as empty as it is.
This guy left Sony in december 2015. Why lie and say "Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves" ?
I don't particularly care for Sony (read: I think they're miserable bastards), but come on!
It doesn't take 50 hours to figure that out in NMS. Granted, it will take longer than the average game to figure out how misrepresented it is, but 50 hours? Not even close. I would have refunded at 5 hours, except I knew it was against Steam's official policy so I didn't bother to try until reports started to come out that Steam might be bending the rules.
Honestly I don't care too much about the money - I never spend money on games that I can't afford to write off. It's the principle of it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
If you're refusing a refund to a player who hates your game after playing it for 50 hours...
You're the wrong person to be a decision maker.
- You made a game that someone hates after only two days
- After giving your game every chance in the world to live up to what the player expects, after 50 hours of play they can't stand it anymore and never want to play it again
- You defrauded (in the legal sense) consumers who bought your product expecting to get what they were told only to find they weren't.
This is not unusual for Sony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but it is just another example of a company that HATES ITS CUSTOMERS and wishes they would just SPEND MONEY AND SHUT UP.
I'm sorry, Sony. This is why I gave my PS3 away. This is why I will never ever buy your products.
Those players you've upset... they're not like me. They're fans of your products. They looked forward to this game.
Oops. Not any more.
Public corporations exist to improve shareholder value. Typically this is done with growth and sales. Good luck alienating all your customers and seeing those chickens come home to roost.
Ehud "Sony can kiss my arstechnica" Gavron
Tucson, AZ US
With that kind of game supposedly based on exploration, you have to invest quite some time to find out that no, there's nothing to do here. 50h might be stretching out a bit, but even 20-30 hours of gameplay should not be enough to find everything if the game was not as empty as it is.
What's going on is you start the game, you fart around trying to get the stuff to get off planet. Then you fart around trying to get the stuff to go to other star systems. There is this impression that the good bit will start once you get past these initial challenges. However it doesn't. The next start system has more planets with the same active items (buildings you can go in).
There are no instructions. So you don't know if you are missing something important.
It can easily take 50 hours to work out that it isn't going to get better.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Most of the time, people DON'T get a refund after 50 hours. The major vendors are making an exception in this case, because the game has been so overwhelmingly reviled. It is in their best interest to grant these refunds, because that ensures that their customers will still buy games from them in the future, trusting that if it turns out to be a turd, they can get their money back.
Overall, gamers keep their games, so granting the occasional out-of-policy refund when a game is a huge flop is still the most profitable move.
Customers aren't forcing the issue here. They can't. They are requesting the refund...saying "please"...and the venders are choosing to say yes. Which is good business.
There is a lot of grinding in this game. Mining, mining and more mining. 30-40 hours to realise there is no depth and it's all just the same seems reasonable. Lots of games need big time investments to pay off, and NMS needs time to see that the claimed features aren't there, especially if you started playing on day one.
You can never get that time wasted blasting rocks apart for nothing back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY ASKED FOR A FUCKING STATEMENT FROM STEAM REGARDING THEIR REFUND POLICY ON NMS?
Let me address this:
Firstly Slashdot is a news aggregator. No one here will go out and ask anything. They will find links and post them for discussion. Let me do that for you now.
Steam will refund a game owned less than 14 days and played less than two hours. With lots of people reporting refunds after many hours of gameplay their policy or statement becomes completely irrelevant, as the story here is that they aren't following their policy. And neither is Sony.
Feel free to do your own real journalism on a real journalism site. After you're done maybe post the story to a couple of news aggregators like Slashdot.
But before you do fix your capslock key, shouting makes it looks like your have tantrum issues.
This is another reminder on why one should not buy new games as they come out.
Things like:
Missing features
Huge bugs
A lot of the content moved to DLCs for separate price.
I stopped buying new titles quite many years ago and instead I just wait until they hit the bargain bin, preferably in an all inclusive version that includes all the DLCs maybe two years later. Also the biggest bugs should have been fixed by that time and so on.
In some cases it is hard to wait, but so far I have held fast. Fallout 4 was the recent "difficult to not buy" thing, but since they are almost done with the DLCs for it, I can likely get it some time next year for a more reasonable price for the all DLCs included version.
...playing a game for 50 hours and then returning it is much like buying an outfit for a special occasion, wearing it to it, and then returning it.
The sleaze fact is pretty much the same, and the only fact that would mitigate the game playing (and no one has alleged this) is at that point the game then becomes unplayable.
Teenagers whine about getting their money back more frequently than they masturbate. If the server goes down for a few hours, money back. If their character dies, money back. If someone griefs them, money back. If Joe has green armor and John can't get some too, money back. If they're bored with playing this game after a month, money back. I'm not even joking here. If you've ever frequented any MMO forum all the way back to Ultima Online (literally just pick any MMO) they're loaded with these kids whining about refunds.
I wonder if hes this passionate about the SecuRom debacle.
You would think he would know the distinction. You can safely ignore anything he says on this subject.
Good-bye
The game is set up to strongly, strongly hint that you unlock content as you move down one of two content paths.
You don't. Everything can be unlocked on the first planet.
The only way you're going to discover that is by talking to other players or after many hours of grinding.
I personally broke Steam's two hour limit simply trying to get the damned game to run, primarily due to the horrible way the options menu is set up. (Eventually I discovered you can just edit an XML file to fiddle with options. That and a day-one patch probably fixed my issues - but also sent me past the refund time limit.)
Given the blatantly false hype on the game right up to the day before the launch, I'd say the refunds are preventing a much more expensive class action lawsuit that could very easily be won by the players by just running the trailer footage alongside the actual gameplay footage. What was promised was not delivered, and the only reason you had as many preorders as you did was due to the promises of the developers. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it and pissed off again, maybe I'll pen a letter to the FTC asking them to look into it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I am one of those who bought the game on pre-order at day 1 from GOG. The reasons for pre-order were many, but to name a few:
- Hype.
- The ability to explore planets never-before explored.
- The shop variety, both as looks as well as role.
- Hacking mini-games.
- Procedurally generated space stations.
- Ability to participate to large battles and take sides.
- The mystery at the center of the galaxy/universe.
Out of all the above, only the first two were in the game at release.
Now, I am at 26h 41m clocked time according to GOG Galaxy and I am deeply disappointed in the game. I have done everything there is to be done except reaching the center (by the way, there's nothing there, the game throws you into a new galaxy with your ship crashed, just as if you start the game afresh). I have created a ticket with GOG asking for a refund as credit granted for buying other games from the same platform. The message is below.
Hi team,
I would like to start by saying this is the first time ever I am trying to refund a game. Never before has this happened, even for games I realized I don't like and stopped playing after a little bit. that is because not liking those games was not the developer's fault, but simply they weren't my type of game.
In case of No Man's Sky, however, my reason for asking for a refund is different. It's not me disliking the game. It's me realizing I was misled into buying something that isn't what was promised. The game simply does not have its advertised features. I realized (too late) that i was lied to.
So here's what I propose: I don't actually want my money back. What i would like to happen, if possible of course, would be for my account to be credited back a partial amount of what I spent on No Man's Sky, so that I would be able to buy other games from GOG up to that amount. The percentage can be as little as 75% of the spent sum, up to your decision, to amend for my game time. It's only fair to treat this game as a "second-hand" resale.
Please let me know whether my proposal is fine, and even if not, I would understand. I have chosen GOG for this game because I liked the way you handle your customers, and thus I hope my impression will be a lasting one.
Thank you for reading my ticket and hope to hear from you soon.
Best regards,
war4peace
Now, of course some here would say "but you played 27 hours of it". Yes. I could as well have played 2 hours, because after that it's the same thing repeating itself over and over. And yes, indeed, that is my first ever attempt to refund a game I played, and I own 176 games on Steam, half of which I never played but those were not developer's fault. No Man's Sky is indeed developer's fault - and morally speaking there's a very strong case for refunds for anyone who wants one.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have you tried Space Engine? It's pure exploration with no game elements, be that a plus or minus for you, and is free.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So be a grownup and read the reviews before you buy. Or be a grownup and accept the consequences of choosing to gamble by buying it before you know for sure what you're getting.
Really, nobody comes out of this one looking particularly well.
No Man's Sky is a mediocre, so-so-ish game. If it had been a $25 indie title that slipped out quietly, it would probably have had a pretty decent reception. But it was hyped, by a developer who appears to want to be the second coming of late-career Peter Molyneux, to be a game that was both fundamentally different to and better than the game that was actually released.
But the people asking for refunds after putting a serious amount of time into the game are also kinda jerks. Digital-purchase refunds have come on a long way in the last couple of years. Weirdly, we have EA to thank for this, as they were the first major party to take the plunge on it, via Origin (hey, credit where it's due). But refund policies set sensible limits. If you've put double-digit hours into a game before deciding you want a refund, you are probably doing something wrong. What's more, the gap between expectations and reality with No Man's Sky was widely known within 24 hours of release. If you got stung because you pre-ordered... then for the love of all that is holy, stop pre-ordering.
And a special de-merit here for much of the gaming media. Quite a few outlets have put more time into defending Hello Games, because gamers are angry with them (boo! hiss! angry gamers! they must all be sexists!) than they have taking them to task for some seriously deceptive marketing.
I did buy it myself. A week or so after launch (so I knew full well what it was like), I managed to get a fairly cheap PC code via cdkeys.com. At the greatly discounted price I paid, the game is more or less worth the money. I put 12 hours or so into it before I got bored and moved on. Mods might add some value to it in time. But I don't feel the need for a refund.
Is it Steam tracking the time? Because they have many cases where the patcher/launcher is what's being tracked. You can have 20 hours for a game you have never even loaded.
Add in persistent patchers that sit in the tray to grab updates for you, you can easily get THOUSANDS of hours for a game you have really only played 10 hours of.
If you've got twenty hours of painful repetitive play into a game, you might spent a few hours trying to get back to your ship so you can continue from there rather than starting over. This is especially true if you are close to a promised reward.
I didn't read much about this game before it came out, but it seemed interesting since exploring landscapes is some of my favorite stuff to do in games. So far it seems a lot like Starflight by Electronic Arts which I loved as a kid, and I'm happy with that.
Sounds like a lot of people were promised something that was not well defined, and was partially defined by just the aspirations developers had, and then the potential buyers filled in the gaps with their own ideas of what could be. The first pre-release live streams of the game were interesting for these people because it was the first time the moment to moment gameplay was conveyed. For the last 3 years before nobody really knew.
Twinstiq, game news
If you buy a game through Steam the patcher/launcher IS Steam.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Indeed. NMS is built around a painful clicky grind. Seriously, you have to land, mine up resources, take off, click dozens of times to craft warp cells, click to load them, click through the slow, awkward starmap, wait through the animation, repeat four more times until you're out of warp cells and ready to repeat... all in order to go a bit over 1000 light years. Out of nearly 180000 that you have to do to reach the center. Where you're told that the game will utterly change, where planets get weirder and the life stranger and all sorts of other things are going on (none of that is true) and to reach the "ending", which turns out to be nothing more than the game actually punishing you for getting there by zooming out and crash landing your ship in the next effectively identical galaxy.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The reason they're so eager to give refunds is likely to avoid false advertising lawsuits. Even on release, many of the collector's edition boxes had a sticker over the ESRB/CERO rating. Why? Because even after the game went gold, the ESRB and CERO both believed that the game had online multiplayer. The sticker had a replacement ESRB/CERO rating that was different because the ESRB and CERO now understood that there was no online content whatsoever.
At the same time, there are also "online features" in the game which don't appear to actually do anything. People were reporting earlier this week that the game doesn't save any of the names you give to planets or creatures - once you've named enough stuff, the older stuff starts getting deleted. I don't know if anyone's been over the game with a network mapper to see if it's sending out packets of any sort, but I'd guess not.
The companies are probably giving refunds so late because they don't want a class-action lawsuit on their hands. I'm sure a class-action attorney could find plenty of people who bought the game on the reasonable belief (given the interviews the lead developer did with various media outlets) that the game had multiplayer.
Because lying marketers are a bigger problem to me than tantruming netizens, both because the latter are easier to filter out and because economy can't really work without the former because nobody can buy your product if they don't know it exists, no matter how useful it might be for them, thus logic dictates I side with the latter.
Also, having to keep your guard up at all times least some predatory asshole takes advantage of you is a miserable and wasteful way to live. Humanity has a habit of driving anything that preys on us into extinction or as close as possible where ever we go; why break with that tradition with those of us who choose to prey on their own species?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The sad thing is, even with the game in the state that it's in, if the development house had been at all decent, had at all play tested, they could have turned it into something that'd be at least decent to play. By means of:
1) Instead of all resources densely available on each planet, resources should be rare and sparse, so you have to actually look and survive.
2) Instead of all buildings densely spaced on each planet, each planet should have between "zero" and "a few" things present so that you don't experience basically the entire game on your first planet.
3) Scanning shouldn't tell you exactly where things are, only approximations, so that it's not just a "fly right to the marker, walk for fifteen seconds, then either pick it up in no time at all, or waste a ton of time mining".
4) In return for upping the actual "exploration" elements that the game was sold on, vastly reduce the busywork grind.
Unfortunately, the developers have actually taken every opportunity to increase the grind since it was released.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
When I read about the game, it sounded like a LOT of fun, so I checked into Steam to see if it was one of the ever-growing number of titles that run on Linux.. Alas, I was to find it was not.. Since I don't/won't run Windows on any of my computers, and use the Linux Steam client, I found that I was not going to be able to play *this* game.. After reading this article, It seems I dodged a bullet, both due to the lies AND the fact that Sony is behind this... Microsoft and Sony are on the "dead_to_me" list.... Large caliber bullet successfully dodged...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Also, having to keep your guard up at all times least some predatory asshole takes advantage of you is a miserable and wasteful way to live.
Then take a gamble sometimes. But be a grownup and accept that you chose to take a risk. Don't go crying when it doesn't work out.
Who cares what it was "pitched as"? Wait and read the reviews and stop being a tool.
It's the WAHHHHHHHHHHHmbulance to bring Sony's Content Director (wtf?) a teddy bear and some soft fluffy tissues to help with his pain and sorrow
He's not a Sony person. But yeah, name-calling is rarely helpful. Most people on Twitter would be better off without Twitter.
It's actually ok. Not great, but not shitty either -- at least on console.
I'm not a gamer, but the thing that interests me that no one is talking about is the fact that they apparently know how long you have played the game. Why is anyone OK with that?
Every Windows 10 story on Slashdot is filled with vitriol over Microsoft's tracking, but here's a story about a company that apparently knows exactly how long (and presumably that implies they know exactly when) you've played the game and nobody seems to even mention what a grotesque invasion of privacy that is.
Why does Microsoft get chastised but apparently tracking by Sony doesn't even warrant a mention? Bizarre.
Or we can simply hold peope accountable who lie and defraud people.
As soon as I got into space, and landed on the 2nd planet, and saw it was pretty much the same as the first planet, I knew what was up. That was about 6 hours in. (4 hours past Steam's 2 hour refund limit).
You might think 6 hours is a long time to get to that point, but I played a few minutes at a time, and loading time counts. At least an hour of the first 6 was loading screen, because I played in 5 or 10 minute increments. 5 to 10 minutes is about how long it would take the game to bore the ever-loving shit out of me, and I'd go do something else, thinking "I'll come back to it later when I'm in the mood, and it will be better when I'm in the right mood for it". It never was.
First 6 hours also included multiple false starts. One crash, and multiple instances of alt-tabbing out, and can't alt-tab back in...... all of this before I discovered how saving works, so every time, I started from scratch. Save file I'm currently in didn't even START within the first 2 hours of gameplay. No exaggeration.
I've abandoned the game at this point, with 13 hours of gameplay. I'm done with it.
Also, Atlas reminds me of the 'Tet' from Oblivion. Are we an effective team, Hello Games?
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Acting like a grownup is helpful in general. Protecting fools from their own foolishness is a never-ending task. What do they ever do to deserve anyone's help anyway? We'll all be better off if they just grow up.
I canceled my pre-order 2 days before launch, because it was very clear at that time that the game was massively over-hyped and could not really deliver and was over-priced in addition.
That said, if Steam now refunds regardless of playtime, it must be a lot worse than I thought. They would not do that unless they have a lot of really angry customers. I think what was stolen here was primarily player time by promising the universe and delivering very little.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I very much support this stance and that includes most forms of entertainment. The other option is that you can decide to be a patron of an artist (e.g. by Patreon these days), but that is it. The only worth art has is derived by the quality of the experience it imparts. If it fails at that, it is worthless and should be treated as such.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Because of the SSE4a requirement, NMS didn't work on my Phenom2. I gave up after 5 minutes and asked for my refund from Steam. By that time the writing was already on the wall.
Clickety Click
It's not being childish to expect a refund when a company lies to you about the product they're selling.
Not always. In this case it is.
(Unless you bought it on Steam and are asking for a refund because it doesn't function on your PC configuration)
I have heard costco has a legendary refund policy. That they will take back things after years of use.
Those are physical things that use real resources. No mans sky can be copied and deleted a billion times effortlessly, but only a 2 hour refund window? Why can't we have refunds whenever the hell we want on intangible property?
-
That depends on the game. How many hours did it take you to find out that Spore is far from what it was announced to be? The first couple hours are ... well, not too interesting, but that's to be expected from a stage that's basically amoeba level.
How long did it take you to notice that it's not going to get better?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So I should get my money back for Ghostbusters? It was billed as a comedy, and I waited 'til the end to see if there's anything funny going to come up.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
SPOILERS! Hype delays the suckage finding. After all the hype and *PROMISES* it takes a while to find out it's broken. You have to complete the Atlas quest before you find out it sucks. It takes a while to visit all five planets to find out they are all so similar. It takes a while to discover flying to the center of the galaxy just boots you to the next one. It also takes a while before you find out multplayer IS MISSING! If they had said "sorry guys but we had to take it out" but the developers have been tight-lipped about that. It takes more than a couple of hours to realize it doesn't deliver what was promised.
How quickly do you find out that the endgame raids etc. in an MMORPG are crap when starting from level 1?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
You mean the reviews that were more or less forcibly held back and the leaked video that made them flip out because it would 'spoil the awesome game play' when it did nothing of the sort and was only 15 minutes long?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
It takes about fifty hours to reach the center, where all the promised great things that are missing are said to be (hint: they're not).
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
And if everybody played the game without paying for it, Sony wouldn't have lost anything at all. Everybody's happy and Sony starts working hard on its next game.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
this is why you never preorder anything sit back a bit after launch to see if its shit and today thats the case with most stuff. but like good sheep whatever is next on the hype train everyone will be smashing that preorder button.
I chalk it up to youth not knowing their history—Sony (multiple divisions) has treated their customers badly for years. This is merely the latest chapter of this ongoing saga of mistreatment. The Sony fake film critic David Manning, the audio CDs that came with Windows Digital Restrictions Management, and related Windows rootkit (including apparent infringement of copyright) should have been enough to simply decide not to do business with Sony (again, I see no reason to distinguish between divisions; let them suffer the consequences of their "branding" choices and bad behavior).
It's time to add this episode to the list for the next time people forget the lesson.
Digital Citizen
No, the reviews from the 2 weeks after the game's release.
I have it and I "play" it, so-to-speak. I was hoping No Man's Sky to be more interactive, more game-like, turns out it's Space Engine without the space exactness but more vividly colored.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
This is a Hello Games developed, and Hello Games published game. Sony does not have anything on the retail box, no Sony splash screen in the game, it has no link to Sony except that they gave it additional promotion in their presentations, as they do with many other third party games.
Twinstiq, game news
Sorry. Forgot to bill that posting as "joke".
And I don't wanna hear a complaint from you if you think it ain't funny, that's just your opinion.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sorry to be the one to point it out, but you are wrong.
Someoen spends 50 hours on Peggle or Tetris and asks for a refund? I would agree that's a suspicious request.
But 50 hours is an arbitrary number. There are games for which 50 hours is a trivial drop in the bucket of the overall playtime value of the game. I'm sure you could fill a phone book with players of WoW that have a thousand plus hours in it. NMS was promising a universe so vast that it sets a far higher expectation of playtime where 50 hours is trivial.
What justifies "giving a game every change to live up to it's promise"? Seems to me that the people with 50 hours (which can be done in just a couple of days) have given the game every possible opportunity to shine and the game has failed. They were coming at this with expectations set by the developers of a universe so vast that they could spend thousands of hours in the game world. After 50 hours they have had enough and found the vast array of missing features and at that point are actually UNIQUELY QUALIFIED to call BS on the game and ask for a refund.
To me, the bottom line is that the developer failed to deliver what was promised. Users paid for what was promised. Therefore it's fraud and asking for a refund is the least that the developer be worried about.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
I never played No Man's Sky, nor did I follow advertising and trailers much, but I'll say this:
If No Man's Sky indeed promised a bunch of features that never made it to the game, then he'll only have the right to call costumers returning the game thieves once the studio responds criminally for false advertising.
It is that simple. Take the return and shut the fuck up, or explain why you promised stuff on the game that isn't there, and what you are willing to do about it. I don't care if it's a small studio, if there wasn't enough time, or whatever excuse. Size of company does not matter when it comes to false advertisement.
Sorry, but that's the concession I'm willing to make. If the studio promised features in the game that never made it, it does not matter how much someone played it... in fact, gamers who played the game a whole lot only to find out that the stuff the studio promised wasn't there, should be even more entitled for a refund.
Now, if No Man's Sky promised NOTHING about the game beforehand, and people bought it without expectations, I'd give him the right to be outraged. Even though I'm fully aware that playing a set number of hours isn't always enough to make a proper evaluation of certain games, it'd still be a steal to play a game this many hours only to return it afterwards.
But of course there's a reason why Steam is taking the request for refunds in the first place.
But hey, I guess there's a reason this idiot is a FORMER Strategic Content Director after all. No company would like a narrowminded asshole in such a position anyways. He isn't doing any favors for Sony or the studio by writting crap like that too.
The standard Steam refund policy applies to No Man's Sky. There are no special exemptions available. Click here for more detail on the Steam refund policy.
It's a bad sign when they have to remind you of their refund policy. I bet their support system is completely overloaded with complaints, asking for a refund.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I have not played this game, and I'm unlikely ever to do so. In fact, I didn't even know about it until I followed the links from this article. Yes, my rock is very big.
However, looking at the videos of all the concepts this game tried to create, randomly generated worlds to explore, gather resourses, aliens and factions, I was hit with a great thought, born of nostalgia. If you were to take this game engine, and add the plot, aliens, etc from Starflight (1 & 2.) this would probably be the most awesome game ever.
Sadly, it seems that is unlikely to happen.
Not sure I trust this guy. First he promised dozens of Vita games and not delivering on most and then he sides with radical clerics in UK to call my sect non Muslims and we should be sidelined after we promote peaceful ideology in UK
I bought the game, and while I'm disappointed, I understand this is essentially the tuition for the life lesson: don't buy into hype. Never buy a game when it's brand new. Wait and see how it will turn out. To be perfectly fair, I can understand why certain features are missing. When the game came out, there were performance issues that even top-of-the-line gaming systems were struggling to deal with. Those other promised features may have been in the prototype, but cut until it could be determined how to add them without causing massive slowdown. For my part, I'll just accept that I lost my money, and wait to see what happens next. If nothing, I'll still get another $60 on my next payday, so while it stings, it's no great loss.
The Penguin Producer
Okay, so your solution is that no one should ever be an early adopter?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
If you choose to gamble on being an early adopter, don't go crying when your gamble doesn't pay off. Or if you're going to cry about it if it's not what you wanted, then wait and make sure it's what you want before you buy it. Like a grownup.
... because if you bought it without going through the reviews first, and that includes not preordering and waiting for the reviews to show up, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
This title had Molyneux or Spore levels of hype, it was 99.5% guaranteed to disappoint.
Right now the only company I'd preorder from is CD Projekt Red. For the others, I'll wait for the reviews thank you very much.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
AMD is shit. Everyone with half a clue knows this by now.
If it's shit to get 80% of the performance for 50% of the price, then call me shitlord.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reasons for pre-order were many, but to name a few:
I don't see a single one of those that you couldn't have gotten at the official time of release, if NMS was what it was expected to be. I could understand if you mentioned some pre-order bonuses (there were apparently some, as well as a limited-edition box set), but you didn't, so they apparently weren't a big motivation. You mention being a big Steam user, so it couldn't have been because you were worried about it being out of stock in stores.
I rarely play new games, but in the past I have pre-ordered when I got something cool for it right away... something cooler than an in-game thingy upgrade. Or if I could play a pre-release version right away, like when I bought Minecraft back in the alpha days. Actually, being able to play a pre-release game right away is a big reason for me to buy in. That means other people have been playing it, and big problems like NMS has would Get Noticed.
Not that waiting for release day would have helped this time. People didn't realize the enormity of all the problems with NMS until a few days after release. I won't fault anyone from wanting to play on day one instead of waiting a few days for someone else to be a guinea pig. But I've got to draw the line at pre-ordering something you're going to play on Steam (no worries about stores running out) when you don't get some good swag from doing so. Or at least a 15% discount.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief."
I have not played the game but its basically marketed as expansive. Could it take 50 hours to be sure that content you were lead to believe is include isn't, that features you were anticipating and paid your money on the expectation you'd get them are missing?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The thieves are, and have been for a long time, the developers who release a game before it's ready.
Especially in this case where they relied heavily on false advertising ( see any of the " gameplay " trailers that got everyone excited ) to sell a product that didn't come anywhere close to what they promised it would be. Blatant misrepresentation of a product in my opinion.
Then again, I don't pre-order* games anymore because I know better. Even those I really want to play. I force myself to wait, and I've never been disappointed.
* Of course I have to spit the usual stuff out in saying ANYONE who pre-orders a game these days knows the damn thing will be fubar for at least 2-3 patch cycles. Yet, it amazes me when they still get angry about it. Some people just don't make any fucking sense. You know the quote: " Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results . . . . . "
Us old farts know that games are never up to their full potential until a year or so after release. At which time all the bugs have been worked out and patched up. All the DLC will be bundled together and the whole thing will actually be a reasonable price in the Game of the Year Edition. Not to mention you'll be playing it on stronger hardware than what it was developed for. Win-Win-Win all the way around.
For those of you who just gotta have it on launch day, enjoy your frustrations. Try to learn from them if you can.
Indeed (I haven't played) the one thing that is interesting about this game is the (supposed) large number of unique worlds. Of course maybe they don't actually exist either. I'm not going to spend the money to find out.
If a game has crashed I doubt the timers still running.
If the game crashes, there's every chance that Steam thinks it's still running. I think it makes it highly likely to misreport time played.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
With every other product in the world you have a refund period. Why should this game be any different? Is there a demo of NMS? I don't pre-order any games and if there isn't a playing demo download, the chances of me buying it are zero. But if a game really sucks, a refund is a reasonable solution. If somebody has bought dozens of games and only asked for a refund once, it's pretty fair to say that this should be the publisher's problem.
What's going on is you start the game, you fart around trying to get the stuff to get off planet. Then you fart around trying to get the stuff to go to other star systems.
Based on these two sentences this game sounds like a 3D version of Starbound.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
They released a patch so the game now runs on Phenom II's. ( I followed the discussion around the Phenom II issue since I have a Phenom II X4, though I run Linux and play the game on the PS4)
I pre-order when I want to support the developer, giving them a sense of security knowing that some income is secured. However, in order for me to pre-order, I need to be impressed by the game. After looking at IGN gameplay, I was lured into believing the game had way more to offer than it actually did at release.
As for choosing GOG over Steam, it was simply because the GOG e-mail notification came before the Steam one, so by the time Steam sent m,e the notification, I had already bought the game on GOG.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Nah pre-order is a good thing. It means the suckers can take on the risk of getting the game funded and out there, and the rest of us can wait and see once it's done. Everybody (yes I know) wins.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Some people like breaking rocks...I don't even usually blast them in Minecraft, I have removed whole mountains, one block at a time.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
With every other product in the world you have a refund period.
I'm OK with a refund period. I just want Internet whiners and hate-swarmers to grow up and stop burdening everyone with their foolishness and entitlement.
Everyone had the chance to know whatever they needed to know to make an informed choice. But that requires being a grownup and waiting a week or two to buy.
Is there a demo of NMS? I don't pre-order any games and if there isn't a playing demo download, the chances of me buying it are zero.
Cool. Thanks for being a grownup. Let's ask others to grow up now.
But if a game really sucks, a refund is a reasonable solution. If somebody has bought dozens of games and only asked for a refund once, it's pretty fair to say that this should be the publisher's problem.
It doesn't suck. It's ok. It's just not "great" and the minimalistic gameplay isn't fun for some people.
I think Sony's policy is one lifetime refund on a digital purchase as a courtesy. That seems about right.
Wrong. Two off the top of my head, Tribes Ascend and Warframe. Available through Steam, launched through Steam, still have their own launcher.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Since I don't have the points, I'm modding you up in words. Someone clearly made a very poor decision with this game, but as an actual game programmer who has experienced a situation like you described, I can fully agree it wasn't the devs themselves. Incidentally, as a secondary programmer in an independent (but marketed like AAA) game project, I also got the great joys of sending repeated major bug reports. Reports that were never addressed, let alone fixed, until the last 24 hours of development when I was finally handed a full copy of the source code. Not that it mattered, since the project manager added his own features at the end that doubled the final game's bugs.
Good examples, but don't forget every Ubisoft game.
I'm certain they will quickly agree to your demands. Because of how gosh-darn forthright and dare I say, RIGHT you are. But hey, why not charge them $1000 an hour?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I don't know about people needing 30-40 hours to realize there's no depth. I watched two or three hours of various people playing and it was pretty obvious that the game is just one big grind. All people were doing was mining, walking/flying around, learning alien words and buying/selling things at space stations.
People have a legitimate complaint about the developers talking up features that weren't there, but that's why you wait for the reviews and watch other people playing before you spend money on a game.
Not every, but most up until Division. Ubisoft/Uplay has gotten somewhat better Steam integration recently.
With every other product in the world you have a refund period. Why should this game be any different?
Back in the day (the 80's) you used to be able to return games, music and movies just like other products. Then stores starting instituting no-return polices for these items because people were returning them in large numbers.
Many kids of my generation got burned reading video game magazines and then buying a stinker of a game. Retailers are not willing to take on the risk of people wanting to return a perfectly functioning game that they just happened to dislike.
What's going on is you start the game, you fart around trying to get the stuff to get off planet. Then you fart around trying to get the stuff to go to other star systems.
Based on these two sentences this game sounds like a 3D version of Starbound.
I've not played Starbound. But I looked it up and it looks like it's more fun than NMS at a quarter of the price.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I've been to I think 6 or 7 planets so far. I've been in three star systems. The one new thing that was on one planet was water.
Otherwise, the buildings are the same. The resources are slightly distributed - gold on some planets, not on others. Otherwise most things are available anywhere. The grind needed to find new things is huge and I don't think I'm going to continue. It was a bad purchase.
You are ultimately limited by storage. With more storage you could monetize more stuff in one trip and buy a bigger ship with more storage. But I'm estimating about 50 trips up and down from a gold bearing planet to be able to buy a decent ship. That would take weeks of grind, just to reduce the grind a bit. It's not fun.
You have little agency in the game. You don't even get an map so you can't go back to where you've been before except by chance. We have maps on phones today. Why not in the super techy future?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
If done right, NewGame+ is a fine concept. Starting over in a new galaxy wouldn't be a problem at all, if you got some variety out of it. What it sounds like here though is the implementation is so bad, the plus is entirely missing and it's just NewGame.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Minus a couple small things (like every planet has lots of upload points instead of having to find an upload point on just some planets) this is _exactly_ the game Hello Games was hawking. I just don't think the audience was paying attention.
Procedurally generated universe: Check. Of _course_ the universe is therefore limited by the number of procedures and skins available in the download, duh...
Rich Story: Check. You of course have to farm the sources (like monoliths) to extract the story.
Completely customizable personal tool, suit, and ship: Check.
Peace versus War is your choice: Check.
Basically the game was marketed as the opposite of Destiny et al. It's survival and exploration instead of "closet full of boomstick!" : Check.
So I went online and found guides on how to quickly max out your ship, suit, and multitool. In other words guides on how to skip the game content. Skipping game content is boring. Check.
I've seen screenshots of people who've advanced further and faster, including people surrounded by sentinel walkers and whatnot.
I got a great sense of accomplishment when I finally figured out how to properly kit out my ship to take on a swarm of fighters (hint, the cannon is dumb fire but the burst beam is on a tracking turret).
And with a low-slot multi-tool, built poorly, I was _everything's_ bitch. But now I've built up a tool that I barely have to aim to take down large creature in moments. (hint, wide-shot bolt thrower and rail-gun mod then build up all the mining beam distance and focus, then never switch to bolt mode, the mining beam gets an invisible halo of destruction).
I did a free-flight (no pathing) and found myself in a world of hurt, and got back on path.
There are six or eight pathing pips and I've only unlocked one (you get two for free) so I'm assming eventually those other pips mean something.
I've had only one group of crashes on my PS/4 (version 1.4 had a tendency to crash if you opened your inventory in space). Other's have had more crashes. I've hat that same experience on other games, and when it's happened I've done a "rebuild database" on the PS/4 and then reinstalled and the problem went away, so that's more of a platform issue than a stability issue IMHO.
So I've seen a lot of bitching by power gamers and power levelers who then discovered (or didn't figure out) that they should be reading the text in a story game, and no, you _won't_ end up in a one-man super fortress because _duh_, that's not this game.
Quite frankly some times it is boring, which is the nature of exploration, but I've managed to sit down and play for eight hours straight... completely engrossed in the game.
So a bunch of whiners want their money back because they didn't pay attention to the advertisements. Ha Ha, sucks to be stupid. But in terms of being a "bad game"... not so much.
What I regret is that this means that the money won't keep floating in so the company probably won't be able to roll out the next chunk.
TL;DR :: Everything promised has, so far, been present in the game. But if you are a stupid munchkin power gamer, who wants every room to have one monster and one treasure, then you will be sadly disappointed. If you were looking for world of warcraft in space, this is not your game, and its developers never pretended it would be. The people who want their money back are essentially guilty of bad decision making and failure to pay attention to plain-spoken promises.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Hello
We have reviewed your refund request.
We are unable to refund this purchase to your Steam Wallet at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum).
Since the game plays _just_ _fine_ without a connection to "the servers" (at least on PS/4) because it's not WoW in space, the presence of item 2 on this list tells me that you've never actually played this game. "The Servers" in No Man's Sky are just data repositories for the discoveries you upload, and the chance to download other peoples discoveries if you find anybody else's planet. There's no "instancing" because your machine is the instance.
Meanwhile, I have not seen a single broken promise in the game. I don't know what the munchkin power-gamer types _thought_ they were buying... but what I got was pretty much exactly what I was sold: An exploration and survival sandbox game with a rich story that you have to "discover" (by reading the texts you farm out of ancient monoliths and ruins).
Now I know the people who didn't pay attention to what was being sold are quite disappointed because they were thinking they were getting Destiny "life full of boomstick!" redux. But go find me a single video from the makers that tried to sell that at all. They talked about exploring worlds, mining, crafting, and dodging sentinels.
Is the game flawless? Fuck no. It's essentially impossible to find your way back along your flight path to that one planet that had that one resource that you desperately need, and ibid for finding your way back to an on-planet trade hub. So the mapping and waypointing needs some work. And I can see signs of bigger things that got waylaid (like observatories that talk about locations in distant space that, instead, direct you to far-away points on the planet you are on), but I suspect that that became a question of things simplified in play-testing.
So I agree with the parts of your sentiment that "you pay your money and you take your chance", but I disagree with any part of anybody's complaint if they are bitching about "the servers" and the lack of WoW-in-space behaviors.
I've yet to see a single complaint that really boils down to a broken promise. I've seen a lot of complaining about things that were fully disclosed in the advanced coverage where the complainer took great liberties with their imagination, insisting that what they were promised was not delivered. But those undelivered promises seem to be entirely in their heads.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Blame the victim of poor purchasing decisions? If the decision was their own, yes, every time.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's true, but the fact that there's no extras, combined with the unfulfilled promises of the developer makes it a shitty experience.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
But in any case, if he is the *former* Sony director why would this guy's quotes be part of the news story?
Because they know what grinds people's gears. It's purely to enflame the consumers who were tricked by Hello Games' marketing BS.
People used to install the game, then return it, effectively stealing. The problem was actually rampant at the time. It's not rampant now because with digital purchases, you can track things like individual return rates.
No, dipshit. When they want a refund, they cease to be a paying customer. They become a leech and a thief.
50 hours. That works out to be a grand total of TWO DAYS and TWO HOURS. Now I don't know about you, but with physical products there has always been this thing called a 30-day trial; if a product does not work to your standards within 30 days (or one full average *month*), you can return it for a refund, no questions asked. Spread it out to eight hours of gameplay per day, and you're still at just over six days, which is not even a full week. Now, you will probably argue, "well this is a game... with games and movies, you play through or watch it once or twice, then you're done with it." Okay, fine, that's true (well, to an extent...), and generally many games can be beaten in far fewer hours, so in the end maybe this can be considered a "free rental" and worst. But, with all the blatant lies given about the game that were later confirmed after release, honestly, they had it coming to them.
I pre-ordered the game, because I thought it seemed amazing in its size. It is. I've put 6 hours into it, and I decided that I'll wait to play any more until the fucking game is, you know, actually PLAYABLE. I have to run it with all graphical settings down and at a shitty-ass, piss-poor, absolutely fucking RIDICULOUS resolution, and it STILL runs like complete shit. Simply put, the game should NOT have been released in its current state. However, the game *was* actually everything I expected it to be, and the parts they talked out their ass on didn't really interest me, so I originally planned on just keeping it. I have to say, though, that after the initial "wow" factor from how huge the world felt, and then how massive the universe was when I finally left my home planet (5-6 hours), I came to the conclusion that the game is fucking boring as all hell and is showing no signs of improving.
At this point, since Steam is offering refunds, as a pre-orderer whose money was forked over to these sleazy companies many months ago, I am honestly considering taking the opporutunity to get my 60 bucks back. Honestly, this game is an absolute joke at that price. Everything from the lies, to the total lack of optimization, to the obnoxious comments by a shitty company calling their own customers "thieves." I honestly am trying to justify my purchase at this point, and I'm having a difficult time doing so.