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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."
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!
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.
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.
50 hours of gameplay is a long time. As an example, I started playing Tomb Raider (2013) a few days ago - got it in a sale literally years ago and never played, finally got round to playing it. I've completed the story, and am just going back to polish off the areas I didn't get 100% completion on. Only two of those to go, and I'm done.
I have 56 hours of gameplay logged. Just to recap - I've done damned near everything, thoroughly enjoyed myself, and have 56 hours logged. 50 gameplay hours at a game I hate? That would be insane.
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..."
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...