So here in the UK there’s a new law that allows players to claim a refund if the game is ‘broken’ within 30 days of purchase. I’ve already had people on Steam bring this up regarding my Early Access title.
Anyone know how Early Access and beta versions fit in to all this? Seems to me developers are getting screwed over, what’s your thoughts?
Almost every game has bugs. What about games like Goat Simulator?
If anything it is the consumers who have been getting screwed over. Why should a developer be allowed to release a game in a state that would be questionable for any other product?
Frankly we need a law like this in the United States too.
Yes and no. I’m against a beta testing phase that is closer to an actual alpha and I’m against an early access that is trying to charge full price. One of the things I loved about notch’s approach with Minecraft is that he didn’t charge the full price during alpha and beta.
I’ve purchased a number of early access titles in the past. Out of those one of them (Planetary Annihilation) was crashing non-stop for me for about a year and one of them (Cube World) had the developer disappear after one update. I knew the former would be fixed given time, but I would have loved a refund for the latter. Cube World was ~$30.
30 days is excessive, I beat most games in a week. If its broken and I don’t want it I’ll know in about 2 days. People will abuse that.
On the other hand, its notoriously hard to get refunds on software due to the ease of copying and pirating so being guaranteed a refund option is nice. However consumers aren’t entitled to a refund just because a product has bugs. All software has bugs. The Early Access stupidity that’s happening is different and Steam has a refund system for that now.
This is my thoughts exactly, it’s open to abuse and it will get abused. Seems like there’s becoming more and more against developers these days. I can understand there’s a lot of scammers out there but there must be something to protect legitimate developers too.
Yeah it’s a bit much. 3 days is more than sufficient. I don’t think this law can survive without some tweaking. Mind you it is generally a lot of bother to get refunds to begin with so there’s that.
It’s a pretty bad law really. I wasn’t asked if I wanted it passed so I guess it’s not a democracy after all. It’s just the problem here is they’ve basically not improved anything at all, but made it harder for indies.
Agreed. It’s annoying because they’re categorising software development the same as a toaster or a movie when in actual fact it’s not that clean cut. All this law does it make it harder for legit developers in my opinion.
From the wording of the law I would take away as a consumer that early access and kickstarter wouldn’t be a straight up refund as the risks before purchase are clearly stated.
And TBH no software should be fully released with fundamental issues/ flaws, as creators of software we should take responsibility and I would think be protected if we proactively keep consumers information of issues and progress to resolutions.
The problem is, how exactly do you define “broken”. Unity is “broken”. If you doubt that, just look at the issue tracker. Nothing that is broken though means that the software isn’t worth the cost of the license. I could probably find some minor trivial bug in just about any software released if I tried hard enough. The law may help prevent, or provide recourse for, very horribly broken games. But it most certainly will push developers, especially AAA studios, further into the realm of DRM. If you can get your money back, they are going to want to make sure you give the game back as well. That’s the reason digital sales were not historically refundable in the the U.S. If you can buy it and copy it, then there is no way to assure that you have returned it.
I can think of a few games that had fatal bugs that couldn’t be detected until near the end of the game.
Take Jurassic Park for SNES: There was a bug at the very end of the game that prevented you from beating the game. You were supposed to wait for a helicopter to arrive to pick you up and escape the park, but it never arrived, leaving you stranded in the park forever. I can see this law being used for situations like this, but this is incredibly rare.
Simply put it’s too open to interpretation, that’s problematic. If the refund equates to “game breaking” for example the Batman PC release wasn’t of reasonable quality. Sure it makes sense, but small glitches can be used as excuse.
Practically, it won’t change a lot as it’s a UK-only law and as independants/company definitely have to go through 3rd-party platforms (sadly thanks to the EU VAT law which complicated things), it won’t really take effect as normally the responsability of trades and refunds is at the platform holder’s discretion.
For example, both Steam, Apple or GOG are subject to the same refunds laws (at the least for the EU territory) but the conditions greatly differs from one platform to another.
Aand least the product as to be recognized to be faulty, it’s not like the Steam policy where you can get a refund without real reasons…
