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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."
...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.
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.
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
Sony did not develop No Man's Sky. It's also fairly accurate to say that if someone invests 50 hours into a game and then wants a refund...calling them a thief isn't too far off base. That's the same for any retail business out there. If you bought a game and want a refund after an hour or two of trying to get things to work right, that's perfectly fine. 50 hours? No way.
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.
In general, when gamers buy a game, and like it, they don't request a refund. Even if it is a short game and they beat it within 8 hours...if that was their expectation and they liked the game, they usually put it aside and forget it.
SOME gamers are assholes who want to get everything for free, but the industry survives because they are not the majority.
This game got overwhelmingly negative reviews and significant numbers of gamers are all demanding a refund. These are the same gamers that usually don't demand a refund. They didn't suddenly become thieves, they felt lied-to and ripped off, and are asking for a refund.
No thievery here at all, neither legal nor social.
Bollocks.
1) If you buy a game you buy it for life (digital does not rot), so if at any time it seems to stop working properly - especially if it never works too well in the first few weeks after release - you should be entitled to a refund.
2) If you're a srs enthusiast, you'll be hammering the servers for a couple of weekends, which could easily add up to 50 hours of "play"time. That doesn't even mean you're getting a decent experience, just that you're putting up with it and waiting for an improvement that doesn't arrive.
3) A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent without the intention of returning it. Since any physical copy would have to be returned in order to process a refund, and nothing is being taken from the owner at all if the purchase was digital, there is no theft. Since there is no exchange of ANYTHING without consent when a refund is issued, there is no theft. Since there is nothing dishonest about asking for and getting a refund, there is no theft. A lesson in law or ethics might help u here.
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.
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.
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.)
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)
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.
50 hours is a weekend of play. Hoping they'll find the content they were promised. Playing it for a weekened then wanting a refund after lots of play that wasn't as advertised isn't theft. Wearing a dress once to a wedding and requesting a refund is theft. Not because you got use from it, but because it's diminished the value of the object to the owner, once returned.
That it's marginally more entertaining than solitaire doesn't mean it's theft to return a game that isn't as was described when sold. Hell, VW is taking cars back *years* after they were sold and well used, because they weren't as advertised.
Apparently fraud to sell is OK in your world, but returning something when it's discovered isn't.
Learn to love Alaska
50 hours? No way.
You could spend 50 hours in NMS just looking for any of the 100 missing promised features. Sure it's not all a lie? Surely it's there somewhere? Dammit.
The marketing for this product was likely illegal under most nations' consumer protection laws - heck, it was so blatant that even under US law they probably crossed the line. When a product is "not fit for purpose", playtime isn't a relevant factor. If Sony's giving refunds, it's only because their legal team told them to stay clear of fraud. I'll give Steam credit for actually caring about customer trust.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release. Then even after release they continued to lie about it. When two players went to the same place at the same time to see each other (something the developers had continually insisted was possible), the developers pretended it was a bug - even though they knew damn well that it was physically impossible. The game has no real-time net traffic needed to support multiplayer and there is no serious player model included in the game files (there's a couple comical temporary development models in there, along with a monkey in a hat, the Fallout logo, and a bunch of other amusing stuff, mind you).
The reason that so many people played for so long before seeking refunds was because the developers kept insisting that things were in the game that most definitely weren't. And they put in this huge "grind" to try to slow everyone down, to drag out how long it would take for them to find this out. When a player playing nonstop for 20 hours managed to reach the center of the galaxy (the goal) on the same day as release, going through the relentless over-and-over clicking to do so, the developer's "solution" to the "problem" was to cut the distance you travel per warp by a third, tripling the clicky busywork. And they introduced a bug at the exact same time they did so.
And BTW, after being told that everything's at the center of the galaxy - that the creatures get weirder, there's more going on there, that there's a big exciting ending there, you know what's actually there? Absolutely nothing. You go to the center and the game actually punishes you. There's no ending, just an animation of you flying out of the center and it crash lands you in the next galaxy, which is no different from the current one.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
(Some of the videos taking on the subject are really quite brutal / amusing )
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Turn the game on Friday night, and turn it back off Monday morning.
Steam will count in-game pause as "gameplay". I learned that the hard way when I tried to return a game. Steam counts the executable being open as "gameplay". Someone who walks away in a long load screen and doesn't come back until after a leisurely dinner may have never seen any gameplay, yet be out of the return period.
Learn to love Alaska
Experience isn't physical, yet it's something you can buy. When you purchase a game, beat it, and then return it after spending dozens or hundreds of hours playing the title, you've enriched yourself with that experience -- an experience you wouldn't have had otherwise.
You may not be returning something physical, but our concept of property isn't solely tied to physicality. That's why intellectual property is a thing. Now, I suppose if you're fundamentally against the existence of IP you can argue that theft doesn't exist -- but I find this a limited definition that doesn't really match reality. If playing a prerecorded song for hundreds of people at an event can count as infringement (and it does) despite the fact that nothing physical has been stolen or removed, then clearly property has more than a physical component.
No, the devs are thieves. They've lied about what they're selling customers then trying to get out of the refunds by victim blaming. If you sell me a shoddy bill of goods, then you're a fraud no matter how hard I try to make your garbage work. And I deserve a refund after seeing that I was lied to.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
> The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release
Sadly this is correct. Summary of the all the things promised but not delivered, along with things that did make it:
http://www.onemanslie.info/the...
That you don't understand the law, isn't proof that your misapplication of it is appropriate.
Learn to love Alaska
What matters is the intent, mens rea, the will to steal, and the intent to permanently deprave the rightful owner of his use of the item. This is critical. Without, you could become a thief without even wanting to steal anything, by mistake and accident, and I hope we can agree that this is not the intent of the law!
Allow me to show a counter example.
You are in a meeting and you have the habit of putting your cell phone on the table because it's uncomfortable in your pocket. After the meeting, you pick up your cell phone and go back, only to notice in your office that you forgot to take your cell phone along, it's on your office table, and you swiped the cell phone of someone else who just happened to have the same habit and the same phone model. Are you a thief?
According to your original statement a few postings up from this one,
"A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent, regardless of whether or not they plan on returning it."
you would be.
Maybe that's why they don't let you word laws.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.