Whatislove said:
What strikes me as the worst thing is that there are people out there so incredibly petty that they need their two dollars back after (most likely) fully completing the game they paid two freaking dollars for.
Hell, even if the game was total crap I wouldn't refund my $2, it's two fucking dollars for fuck sake, I'd have to have a personal vendetta against a developer to request my two bucks back.
Imagine how awful the game must be that people want their 2 dollars back?
MonsterCrit said:
You're right . it hasn't happened... can it happen? yes. You see the fallacy of history is that nothing happens until it happens . It's why people study history to get a better understanding of cause and effect relationships. Again if it's something that is adopted by the industry at large... gamers will have little choice. Either put up with it.. or take up reading, or samba dancing.
Larger influential publishers would love an excuse to justify tacking another $20 on new release prices. . Bundle two games that would have normally sold for $5 that works out to Bethesda pocketting a cool extra $10. THe thing is there are plenty of games on steam that are sold only in bundles I.e they have no individual listings. That's on of the things the publisher does. A two-pack is ironically a single product.
A god may go down from heaven and personally take you to hell. What "maybe if the world goes crazy could happen" is quite irrelevant here. Gamers are not idiots. they already proved it many times. this wont happen to any publisher that has a brain on his shoulders.
MonsterCrit said:
Define "Good". The irony is. It's more the 'Good Games' that will be hurt the most. But we'll see what happens when M#9 hits steam.
Simple. In this context a good game is a game that either is enjoyable enough to play for 2 hours (whether its that long or its replayability is irrelevant here) or is enjoyable enough that you want to keep it even if you played it for less than 2 hours.
A bad game is one that you want to get rid of within 2 hours.
"Nothing like that will ever happen" , "It will never happen" . Look through history and you always find someone always says that.. and is immediately proven wrong. You need to think in terms of cause and effect.
One very real change that's already happening is that more than a few games have had 'Offline Mode' support patched out. As a protection against abusers. Since steam can't keep track of time played when the game is run in offline or launched without the steam client (don't snicker near a third of steam games can actually be run directly from their install directory.). The Steam DRM is about to become much more obtrusive as more developers actually start implementing it fully.
Sure. Cause: Gamers are able to refund shit games. Effect: bad games will have less profit, good games unaffected.
Cause: shit games bundle with good games for price increase. Effect: noone buys that shit.
Every single one of those games made a mistake. people that wanted to get the game for free already could pirate it. noone is going to bother jumping through refund hoops when a far easier alternative is already possible. Steam DRM offer 0 protection against abusers like that.
Is it near a third now? last time i looked it was less than 5%. I guess it could have increased with the flood of shitty games that probably run on their own. And every single developer that implements it obtrusively will simply be shooting themselves in the foot. Not that i would want to support such a developer to begin with. Probably a lot of older games being sold helps there too.
Lightknight said:
That's not true. You're telling me people won't be tempted to get a refund on a $60 game after they've finished it? People absolutely do that and did that back with EB games had a one week return policy. It was practically issuing a challenge for people to finish a game in that time frame to be able to get the money back to buy another one. That's why the policy ended.
I'm not talking about reducing two hours for larger/longer games. I'm talking about reducing the time for smaller games that can be finished in less than the two hours.
As it turns out, on Origin and GoG that do allow you to refund those games, people dont. so perhaps that would actually be true. Thats not really relevant though. If you have so little content that the player gets bored before 2 hour marker you shouldnt be selling your game. and no, there should be no exception for smaller games. these games being smaller is punishment enough.
No, the indie market wasn't. It was nothing like it is today. Perhaps you could make the argument for relatively small studios but nothing like the incredibly small teams that produced games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, FTL and all the big indie titles now.
Not only that, but there really hasn't been an iOS market for that long either. So where do you believe the indie games market was thriving before Steam created a unified platform for PC? Some backwoods site that you found and enjoyed but no one else knew about?
Indie in the 90's-00's was just a small studio that still had a publisher (aka, not an Indie study by today's standards).
It's only with steam where getting their work on Steam is all the "publisher" they need.
Well true, it wasnt saturated by crap cashins trying to actually profit from asset theft like it is today. The "one-man-team" things certainlly happened though. Its just that there was no centralized marketplace then, and so you had to actually look for them yourself.
There is no need for a centralized site for a market to be alive and well. There were people that self-published. For example the first graphic MMO in worlds history - Tibia (and yes, Ultima Online was a few months later, which was second) was made by 3 colledge students and ran in their basement. The game is still alive and working today.
Tradjus said:
How about no refunds on games under five bucks?
Seems fair to me. o3o
Thats the opposite of fair. Whats fair is equal rules to all games, like it is now.
Whatislove said:
That is not the case with one of the examples in the original post, Beyond Gravity, which actually has favorable reviews and a good steam reputation. 89% positive reviews from 616 reviews total but as soon as the refund policy goes live it has a 72% refund rate? please. I don't think it has anything to do with people not liking it.
Have you seen the game? its something i wouldnt download for free on my phone, let alone pay 2 dollars for. im surprised the refunds are ONLY 72%.
MonsterCrit said:
That wasn't my post... but it raises a point. And to answer your question you only have to look at Skyrim. The game got a tone of negative reviews around thepaid mod thing. Mind you these reviews had nothing to do with the game or the quality of the game. People were just giving thumbs down reviews bew cause they had a beef with a policy.
That I believe shows the general level of maturity. There are easily between 10-30 thousand such users on Steam. It may not seem like much taking into account the steam population but to a small indie dev.. 10K users pulling this sort of crap can and will break the bank.
Lets assume 30k users (your maximum estimate) and that it is 5% bad costumers. that would mean 600k total steam costumers. as we know, in 2014 Steam reached 100 million active users, in which case 30k means its only 0.3% of people. If anything, this would show that gaming community is FAR MORE MATURE than average business costumers.
and im all FOR breaking people that try to sell crap like Beyond Gravity. If Steam had quality control they wouldnt be there to begin with.
Redflash said:
What the hell is wrong with some people (i.e. the ones going 'so what?') on this forum? Because a game doesn't take long to complete or doesn't have replay value, then people are somehow justified in shilling a game dev of 2 bucks? TWO DOLLARS. You're willing to steal (yes, steal, you got the experience and your money) for two dollars, and then justify it to yourself? Lets call a sheep a sheep here. You knew when you bought it that it wasn't a long game, or that the production values weren't going to be stellar. Nobody is buying a two dollar game and then going 'my god, this isn't what I was led to believe at all!'. This is just mean-spiritedness at it's worst and anyone defending ripping off small-time content creators seriously needs to rethink their life in general and their values in particular.
Indeed, what is wrong with some people that think shitty developers that shouldnt exist should be paid more attention to than gamers. if your game takes less than 2 hours and has no replay value you shouldnt be asking money to begin with. period.
And no, thats not theft. Look up the definition of theft. your flat out wrong here.
Yes, lets call sheep a sheep, these developers shouldnt exist. they are whats wrong with gaming.
ark Dreams Never Die? I don't even know this company. 
