I read about this earlier this week. Kind of ridiculous in my opinion. Not everything needs to be refundable. And it doesn't take much thought to understand why any digital industry would drop the refund concept.
I agree, there are plenty of crappy games and broken ones on steam. Its been getting worse and worse over the years as well.
In all fairness to valve there is a disclaimer when you purchase an early access game that says the game is still in development, so its really your own fault for complaining that its not perfect...
Just because a game is crappy doesn't mean that the customer is entitled to a refund. It is the customers responsibility to do some research on the game, there are plenty of reviews and gameplay videos out there. If it is an early access or beta game, they are warned in several ways that the game is incomplete and that there is likely to be broken stuff in it. There is no good reasoning behind he government actions. This will only encourage abuse.
I agree with this. It's up to consumer to research the product and finalize the purchased. The creator or Marketplace isn't forcing you to buy it. Also I don't pay attention to "early access games" anymore because developer/s might just stop working on it after made some fast cash.
Correction: The developers deserve this if they elect to release a (legitimately) broken game. Valve shares some of the responsibility for allowing the broken / nonfunctional product on their service, but the extent of that responsibility does not and should not extend to legal liability for that product. With that said, I won't disagree that Valve needs to stem the tide of garbage, cull the sewage, and do a major QC overhaul on Steam. I wouldn't want them to become Apple and keep a death-grip on their app library or anything, but when you start getting a reputation as a nesting ground for dung beetles, it's time to re-evaluate your process.
I just mean that if they see a game with a bunch of bad reviews and someone bought it they should get there money back. I have a game myself that I did some research on and it turns out it was a bad game AND they stopped updating the early access a month later and never released any other versions.
You took the risk, so it is your fault that your money is gone. I would say that if someone sees bad reviews for a game, and then buys it anyway, then requests a refund, they should be banned from the service because that is clearly abusing the system.
I see both sides. I understand it is not like a pair of gloves and once you have played a game you have experienced the content that you were intended to pay for, something like paying to see a bad movie. On the other hand, there should be some level of recourse if you buy something then feel that it was a mistake afterwards, like walking out of a movie in the first five minutes and getting a pass to come back another time and see something else. You can't just rely on reviews. What about the people who do reviews? Even if I pass on it, at some point someone had to buy that piece of crap. I usually look at reviews when I am shopping online and weigh them based on the content and my opinion of the writing. Sometimes there aren't enough to go on. And then when we are talking about Valve, most of the consumers are pretty young and not likely to make careful decisions anyway. A hosting service like what Valve, Apple, or Google have should at least be responsible to make sure that the product descriptions are accurate. In the past I have downloaded a lot of software, installed it, and found that it was not what I expected then deleted it before I paid for a full version. Trial/premium type software is great this way. In the case of software that does not offer that where you are paying just to download it, some responsibility should be on them to make sure that their users are getting a value that is proportional to the cost. One other thing that I noticed in reading about this was that Valve's policy uses the phrase, "unless required by local law", but is also trying to say "no refunds", which I think is the real problem.
