Steam is allowing No Man's Sky purchasers get a refund after 2 hours of playtime

[WYP]

Steam is allowing No Man's Sky purchasers get a refund after 2 hours of playtime, with users with playtimes as of over 13 hours reportedly getting refunds.



Read more on No Man's Sky players getting refunds.

 

[NeverBackDown]

This really isn't news though.
With 2 hours or 14days or less, refunds are automatic. Anything more was up to Steams discretion. And they usually say yes provided it was a recent purchase and not one from long ago

 

[SeekaX]

"Why are these features which weren't really supposed to be in the game not in the game?"
Doing the slightest bit of research before purchasing a game is just too much to ask for these days. And now papa Gaben needs to step in to make the kids stop crying.
The only valid reason for a refund after 2h of playtime should be poor performance, not 'i had unreasonable expectations'.
Oh well, i'm enjoying it for what it is and it's meeting the expectations i had, so i'll keep it.

 

[NeverBackDown]

"Why are these features which weren't really supposed to be in the game not in the game?"
Doing the slightest bit of research before purchasing a game is just too much to ask for these days. And now papa Gaben needs to step in to make the kids stop crying.
The only valid reason for a refund after 2h of playtime should be poor performance, not 'i had unreasonable expectations'.
Oh well, i'm enjoying it for what it is and it's meeting the expectations i had, so i'll keep it.

Normally yes I would agree. However they didn't really allow anyone to review it before release and they were locking it down to keep raising the hype. So in this instance, yeah I think it's fair. But if you waited s couple days after release, then that's your fault really..

 

[SeekaX]

Normally yes I would agree. However they didn't really allow anyone to review it before release and they were locking it down to keep raising the hype. So in this instance, yeah I think it's fair. But if you waited s couple days after release, then that's your fault really..

The game released on PS4 three days before it released on PC and like an hour after release you can find tons of gameplay videos. So whoever got surprised by the gameplay really didn't pay any attention.

 

[WYP]

Jim Sterling did a very good piece on Hello Games' marketing of No Man's Sky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2qKAX_QaoI

Hello Games did promise a lot of features that are not in the game and were very vague about what the game actually was until release.

 

[shambles1980]

having looked at this..
about 3-4k ppl have refunded as far as i can tell.. (not easy to judge as ppl could be buying at the same time others are refunding)
BUT less than 10% of the concurrent players 2 weeks ago play now. in less than 2 weeks it dropped from over 200k ppl playing to less than 20k.

That's just ridiculously bad infact its terrible.. I bet more people concurrently play super mario land on an emulator than are playing this brand new game.
and i fully agree that they should all be entitled to a refund. HOWEVER.

If they have actually played the game for an excessive amount of time then no.. But owning the game with only a few hours of game play "probably takes you 5 hours to notice it was all a massive lie"
then you should get a refund. Steam should check your library, see you have the game see you played it for 0-12 hours then didn't look at it again, a pop up should appear saying:
"do you want a refund for this game ?"

Should make life nice and simple.
some people wont refund because they have no idea how the gaming crash of the 80's happened and dont think it could possibly happen again.
But who knows maybe every one who could refund would refund.
And if hello games goes bankrupt (preferably not quite bankrupt but make NOTHING on the game at all, possibly a small loss). well that will teach them and the games industry a valuable lesson about lying and over hype.

Which would be the best thing for every one.

 

[WYP]

having looked at this..
about 3-4k ppl have refunded as far as i can tell.. (not easy to judge as ppl could be buying at the same time others are refunding)
BUT less than 10% of the concurrent players 2 weeks ago play now. in less than 2 weeks it dropped from over 200k ppl playing to less than 20k.

That's just ridiculously bad infact its terrible.. I bet more people concurrently play super mario land on an emulator.. than are playing this brand new game.
and i fully agree that they should all be entitled to a refund. HOWEVER.

If they have actually played the game for an excessive amount of time then no.. But owning the game with only a few hours of game play "probably takes you 5 hours to notice it was all a massive lie"
then you should get a refund. Steam should check your library, see you have the game see you played it for 5-12 hours then didn't look at it again, a pop up should appear saying:
"do you want a refund for this game ?"

Should make life nice and simple.
some people wont refund because they have no idea how the gaming crash of the 80's happened and dont think it could possibly happen again.
But who knows maybe every one who could refund would refund.
And if hello games goes bankrupt (preferably not quite bankrupt but make NOTHING on the game at all, possibly a small loss). well that will teach them and the games industry a valuable lesson about lying and over hype.

Which would be the best thing for every one.

I do agree with you here. For games like No Man's Sky 2 hours is not enough to judge it, especially given how long it takes to find out some key features are not in the game.

That being said people getting refunds with 10+ hours of gameplay is a bit much.

2 hours is adequate for most games, though in some cases it is long enough to finish some indie games.

 

[SeekaX]

having looked at this..
about 3-4k ppl have refunded as far as i can tell.. (not easy to judge as ppl could be buying at the same time others are refunding)
BUT less than 10% of the concurrent players 2 weeks ago play now. in less than 2 weeks it dropped from over 200k ppl playing to less than 20k.

That's just ridiculously bad infact its terrible.. I bet more people concurrently play super mario land on an emulator than are playing this brand new game.
and i fully agree that they should all be entitled to a refund. HOWEVER.

If they have actually played the game for an excessive amount of time then no.. But owning the game with only a few hours of game play "probably takes you 5 hours to notice it was all a massive lie"
then you should get a refund. Steam should check your library, see you have the game see you played it for 0-12 hours then didn't look at it again, a pop up should appear saying:
"do you want a refund for this game ?"

Should make life nice and simple.
some people wont refund because they have no idea how the gaming crash of the 80's happened and dont think it could possibly happen again.
But who knows maybe every one who could refund would refund.
And if hello games goes bankrupt (preferably not quite bankrupt but make NOTHING on the game at all, possibly a small loss). well that will teach them and the games industry a valuable lesson about lying and over hype.

Which would be the best thing for every one.

It doesn't take 5h to figure out whether a game meets expectations, i can do that without even buying the game by watching one of the thousands of people who streamed it on launch and watching the thousands of gameplay videos released early on. Everybody who used their brain to think for once knew that this game was nothing more than an indie game which for some reason got massive exposure, it's a 15 man operation, you don't need to be a genius to know that a team that small can't possibly make a game of the scale people anticipated. When a developer is being vague about what the game is (and personally i don't think they were particularly vague) then you simply don't preorder the game, because you don't know whether it's a game you want to buy or not.
The people who need to learn a lesson are the morons who repeatedly get hyped for games without any regard for what's realistically possible or what has actually been said and then wonder why they keep getting disappointed. I have absolutely no pity for them losing their money. It doesn't take a marketing team to create out of control hype, the players will do that on their own.
At this point pretty much everybody should've been burnt by some preorder, i haven't preordered anything i wasn't 100% informed about since BF3.

 

[WYP]

A lot of the problem is hype culture in general, not enough people wait until after release to buy games.

Hello Games did go to a lot of effort to prevent people from streaming the game before release, even going as far as telling people to avoid gameplay from leaked copies due to "spoilers". I don't think a survival game like this can really be spoiled due to the random elements.

 

[Sliced]

It doesn't take 5h to figure out whether a game meets expectations, i can do that without even buying the game by watching one of the thousands of people who streamed it on launch and watching the thousands of gameplay videos released early on. Everybody who used their brain to think for once knew that this game was nothing more than an indie game which for some reason got massive exposure, it's a 15 man operation, you don't need to be a genius to know that a team that small can't possibly make a game of the scale people anticipated. When a developer is being vague about what the game is (and personally i don't think they were particularly vague) then you simply don't preorder the game, because you don't know whether it's a game you want to buy or not.
The people who need to learn a lesson are the morons who repeatedly get hyped for games without any regard for what's realistically possible or what has actually been said and then wonder why they keep getting disappointed. I have absolutely no pity for them losing their money. It doesn't take a marketing team to create out of control hype, the players will do that on their own.
At this point pretty much everybody should've been burnt by some preorder, i haven't preordered anything i wasn't 100% informed about since BF3.

When I want to buy a game I don't want it ruined. I don't watch game play before I have bought and played the game. I guess that makes me a moron ey?
Even if it is a 15 man team, what they were promising should have been possible.

I bought me and my wife a copy, I played for around 6 hours before I relised it was a complete lie. I checked reviews and it was confirmed. So I asked for a refund for both, asking for steam cash (winter sale ain't far away) and got the money back for both games.

They should not have lied. He went out of his way to lie, and now his and all of his employees names have been destroyed all for some money that they now have to watch get refunded.

 

[SeekaX]

When I want to buy a game I don't want it ruined. I don't watch game play before I have bought and played the game. I guess that makes me a moron ey?
Even if it is a 15 man team, what they were promising should have been possible.

I bought me and my wife a copy, I played for around 6 hours before I relised it was a complete lie. I checked reviews and it was confirmed. So I asked for a refund for both, asking for steam cash (winter sale ain't far away) and got the money back for both games.

They should not have lied. He went out of his way to lie, and now his and all of his employees names have been destroyed all for some money that they now have to watch get refunded.

Do you also blindly buy cars because you don't want your driving experience ruined? Oh i wonder why this car that was praised in the commercials is so crappy, maybe because it was an advertisement and i shouldn't just swallow everything i'm told by a salesman as the truth? Maybe i should've taken a test drive and read some reviews before putting my money down? The game doesn't even have a real story, there was pretty much nothing to be spoilered by watching a ten minute gameplay video.
I am glad that you know exactly what a 15 man team (not all of which are developers) can achieve, i've been following a few small professional development teams working full time and especially when everything is done from scratch progress is very slow. Just for reference, Frontier has 260 employees and even their progress has been slow but steady as well.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Do you also blindly buy cars because you don't want your driving experience ruined? Oh i wonder why this car that was praised in the commercials is so crappy, maybe because it was an advertisement and i shouldn't just swallow everything i'm told by a salesman as the truth? Maybe i should've taken a test drive and read some reviews before putting my money down? The game doesn't even have a real story, there was pretty much nothing to be spoilered by watching a ten minute gameplay video.
I am glad that you know exactly what a 15 man team (not all of which are developers) can achieve, i've been following a few small professional development teams working full time and especially when everything is done from scratch progress is very slow. Just for reference, Frontier has 260 employees and even their progress has been slow but steady as well.

Not really a comparable analogy though. $60 investment vs something from $15000 to well above that.. There's a difference, one of which is you can't refund your car.

 

[SeekaX]

Not really a comparable analogy though. $60 investment vs something from $15000 to well above that.. There's a difference, one of which is you can't refund your car.

Spending money is spending money, regardless of the amount you should always consider whether it's worth it or not and if what you are buying is actually what it promises to be. The testdrive would be the equivalent of the steam 2h refund policy. I could make the same analogy with PC parts if that's more fitting.
Also you can refund a car if it's broken while warranty lasts, which would be a valid reason to retun the game after the 2h period on steam as well. You can't refund it after weeks only because you expected the car to be better than it is and i think the same should apply to games.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Spending money is spending money, regardless of the amount you should always consider whether it's worth it or not and if what you are buying is actually what it promises to be. The testdrive would be the equivalent of the steam 2h refund policy. I could make the same analogy with PC parts if that's more fitting.

You can't test a game. You buy it, you don't like it, you refund it if it's possible. But see, you bought it already. That's not a test, that's owning it. You don't own the car when you test it.
You're taking this kinda far tbh. This thread is about what steam is allowing, just because you feel people should do more research before buying doesn't mean they do. All the analogies in the world won't change that, it always been this way.

 

[shambles1980]

i say if there were no refunds we would have another gaming market crash, now an insistence ppl should watch reviews 1st is a bit redundant. you enjoy the game 90% of reviews dont, so by your logic you shouldn't even have played the game. the fact that you have implies you didnt believe the reviews yet expect others to be dependent on them. that has to be at the least slightly hypocritical.. some people will enjoy it but to claim others that dont because they were lied too even after people showed the lies shouldn't get a refund is borderline fanboy levels of defensive.

also as for your car analogy, if it was a broken mess like nms they would recall them, and refund much later than 2 hours after purchase "see toyota". also jaguar xj220 is a good example of a car that wasn't what it promised and was refunded due to not meeting expectations.

if you move your analogy to hardware i will mention the 970

 

[SeekaX]

You can't test a game. You buy it, you don't like it, you refund it if it's possible. But see, you bought it already. That's not a test, that's owning it. You don't own the car when you test it.
You're taking this kinda far tbh. This thread is about what steam is allowing, just because you feel people should do more research before buying doesn't mean they do. All the analogies in the world won't change that, it always been this way.

Of course it's not exactly the same, it's an analogy, you can always poke holes in an analogy. I didn't say the 2 hour refund policy is a bad thing, it's just like a testdrive, with the difference that in one case you get your money back while in the other case you don't pay before because it's a large sum of money. In both cases you are not forced to keep/buy the product. In the EU i can buy PC parts and return them without stating a reason within two weeks, but after those two weeks i have to state a solid reason, i can't return it because it doesn't overclock as well as i'd like it to for example. Take that analogy if the testdrive one is too different for you.
Just because people have always done it some way and will always do it some way doesn't make it right and it certainly doesn't exempt them from criticism. Of course me trying to showcase that these people could avoid these situations won't change the world, but if it makes just one person reconsider their ways i'll consider coming up with the analogies and posts worth the effort.

i say if there were no refunds we would have another gaming market crash, now an insistence ppl should watch reviews 1st is a bit redundant. you enjoy the game 90% of reviews dont, so by your logic you shouldn't even have played the game. the fact that you have implies you didnt believe the reviews yet expect others to be dependent on them. that has to be at the least slightly hypocritical.. some people will enjoy it but to claim others that dont because they were lied too even after people showed the lies shouldn't get a refund is borderline fanboy levels of defensive.

also as for your car analogy, if it was a broken mess like nms they would recall them, and refund much later than 2 hours after purchase. also jaguar xj220 is a good example of a car that wasn't what it promised and was refunded

I haven't read a game review in years, i watch gameplay videos and make up my own mind. Being lied to is one thing, interpreting vague statements and doing absolutely nothing to verify those interpretations and then complaining about being lied to another. I'm not defending Hello Game's marketing, i'm criticizing people's inability to take responsibility for their own actions. The exact same arguments apply to the Division, and that is not a game i like, still i don't blame Ubisoft for people buying a game they shouldn't have bought. I didn't buy it, despite it sounding very promising, because i do my homework before buying games.
NMS is only a broken mess if you are one of the people who suffered from abysmal performance, in which case i have no problem with you getting a refund, that's fair. The XJ220 is a classic and goes for well over half a million dollars these days, i bet those folks who returned it wouldn't have done so in hindsight, not that that has anything to do with NMS, just a sidenote. Can't find anything about them refunding the car for lack of performance, got any links?

 

[SuB]

So I'd just like to point out, that I have 19 hours and I got told no on the refund.

And to those saying "should have done your research" I'd agree but http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/ have a read of that.

 

[AlienALX]

Thing is most reviewers these days are terribly economical with the truth any way. I read the complete review of the latest Deus Ex game and nowhere did it say it ran like a dog. In fact they gave it an award.

The same rang true for GTAIV. Every review I read said it was the best game ever made. It took years before I could run it properly by which time it looked stupid.

And then there's the raised point that basically reviewers have completed the game so will drop enormous spoilers throughout the review.

Any way no skin off my nose.

 

[shambles1980]

when you ask the game dev "can you do.." and he says Yes. when you cant. that is a lie, not vague, just a lie..

he specifically "not vaguely" said you could have human interactions, they could see you and you could see them, You could fight "be hostile" if you wanted, and you could grief other people..
those were specific statements "not vague" they were lies.
he said that you could hack doors "lie"
he said you wouldn't have to do any resource gathering if you wanted "lie"
he said there was a faction system "lie"
Those are just a few i remember off the top of my head, and they were not vague. or implied they were specific statements or a direct "yes" answer to a straight question.

And really. if the game dev specifically states one thing. who will believe differently until they find out its just a big lie?

Then you have the 2 guys that found each other on a live stream and went to the exact same place at the exact same time, and found you couldn't see each other at all.
What did the game dev post about it??
he posted:
"wow 2 players finding each other on the 1st day, my mind blown"
Now that's not a lie, but to people who didn't know that the story was emerging because he had lied, to them it seemed like 2 players had found and could see each other.

i honestly think the man is a pathological deranged liar.

and if you think he didn't lie, then you have not watched any of the build up. because if you had you would have seen there is no vagueness for most of the things, its just out right yes this happens. yes you will be able to do this.
And turns out no you cant. because it was lies.

as for the xj220 its pretty well known that the car was a massive disaster at the time, it promised to come with a v12 jaguar engine 4 wheel steering and a whole host of other things, preorders came in and the car was built but it wasnt built to spec it had a metro engine and alot of other things were not as promised, people demanded their money back and jaguar tried to sue them..

its quite an interesting story.
p.s the xj220 was £600,000 new so.. them being worth 1/2 a million now when you factor in inflation is pretty poor and i dont think the people who refunded would be too upset about it. hell if they just left that money in the bank with compound interest they would be laughing about it. or if they spent it on a house they would have made a fortune if they sold that 1990's £600k house today.