Steam is NOT Offering Special Exceptions For No Man's Sky Refunds

runic knight

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Mar 26, 2011
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FirstNameLastName said:
Perhaps if games had to actually exist before becoming financially viable we wouldn't be in this situation so often. Fuck yes I'm victim blaming the consumers here.

I'm not really sure how to feel about all this. On one hand, Sean Murry has well and truly made my list of slimy PR guys, and I have no love the any of the companies involved here. But on the other hand, I can bring myself to feel neither sympathy nor joy for the misfortune of those who were sucked up into the hype cyclone and spat out the other side. All I can do is shake my head and mutter to myself in impotent rage, "damn you. Damn you all. This is your fault; if you weren't so quick to throw fistfuls of cash at the developers on hype alone and instead waited to see if it was worth buying then we wouldn't be in this situation. But no, you had to make the game a financial success before it was even released."

Now, I want to stress yet again that I'm not absolving the developers of guilt here, just saying, if people weren't so keen to by snake oil there wouldn't be so many snake oil salesmen around, and perhaps their presence ought to make everyone a bit more suspicious when making future purchases.
You blame and punish the conman. Always. Not the idiots who were suckered, but the people actively and maliciously taking advantage of them. Blaming the people for believing lies and false advertising is pointless. Even at the best and they wisen up to the current con, a fresh one will taker its place and the learning process starts again. It is pointless to blame those who have been suckered unless they make a pattern out of it individually, something that seems fairly rare to hear about actually. Most people get burned once and learn, but with so many customers out there, that is a lot of opportunities to con. Add to that in this case, while not all games deliver on promises, kickstarters and pre-purchase programs can and have delivered well. Makes it more of a crapshoot then simply being conned outright. And given the nature of the con here, the false advertising and undelivered promises, I would liken this more to an investment company outright lying.

In the end, while you can say they should have seen it coming, the legal protections from such behavior begs the question of why they should have. At the end of the day, most people assumed that if you advertise a product you are legally responsible to deliver upon it. Their willful failure to do so means they are in the wrong, and while I do get the argument of "they shoulda known better", I don't see it as very strongly supported here. They couldn't have known better when purchasing and investment decisions are based on false information and presentation. And saying they should have known the company were lying in the first place is essentially saying that it is their fault for not holding a very negative and pessimistic view of assuming dishonesty even in an environment where such dishonesty is actively penalized legally. It would be like blaming someone for letting a guy in an officer costume and painted car with lights pull him over just to rob him. Yeah, you could argue they should have been completely skeptical about the situation, but realistically, most people aren't going to and that really isn't a bad thing if cons like this are actually dealt with a blamed.
 

Smooth Operator

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Strawb said:
I don't understand this official comment. I used the automated refund system and got a full refund, despite it being over three weeks since purchase, and I had three hours of playtime. Evidently, there are some exceptions.
Well that is always an issue with these refund systems, there are no real concrete rules. Companies will give out refunds without questions to a certain percentage of people so they go on and tell everyone what great service they got, while running others in endless loops until they give up. That way you always get conflicting statements so no one is the wiser.
Which is probably where this news story comes from.

Oh and on the subject of "why you play so long if no good?", this game is an extremely slow burner and all the very cool features that were promised are suppose to be there later on... then you actually get to the end realizing you got fucked, half the shit they sold isn't fucking there.
 

Mike Richards

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Baresark said:
Mike Richards said:
Well, no. Sean Murray said there would be lots of things going on that simply aren't. He talked about alliances with different races and racial standing. Lie. He talked about an in game economy that would make being a trader viable. Lie. He talked about big events and space battles where you could actually fight on the side of these capitol ships to raise your standing with a race. Lie. He talked about different and interesting life appearing on every planet. Lie again. He said that when you got to the center of the universe it would be really special. Lie. He talked about a crafting system that would be vital to your survival. Lie.

He told lots of lies. The thing that a lot of people like to concentrate on is the BS multiplayer thing. I never even cared about that. I wanted a game that would give me interesting things to talk about. This one manages not to. I'm surprised by how little animal life actually exists on any planet I have been to. I'm surprised that I find the same plants on every planet but can be called something completely different. I'm surprised by how bare bones and boring my every interaction with any aliens I meet are. I'm surprised how easy it is to destroy these mighty sentinels that prevent you from doing whatever you want on a planet and easily they drop really good plans.

I enjoyed it for a few systems, then it's the same again and again and again. You are simply flying around a planet, looking for the same buildings that contain the same things, stop at the same looking "points of interest", finding the same ships again with the same captains at the same stations.
Arnoxthe1 said:
Mike Richards said:

Watch this video. Half of which is devoted to pointing out all the BS in all the pre-release information of the game.
RedDeadFred said:
Mike Richards said:
snipidy-dipidy-do
Here's a big list of things that the devs said would be in the game which did not happen with sources to the exact interviews Murray made the claims in:
http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/
You could argue that a lot of those are fairly tiny, but the tiny things add up to creating a universe that feels alive. One of my biggest issues with the game before it came out was that I didn't think it would feel like a living universe because you'd grow to notice the simplicity of the game's systems too quickly.

While I think people should realize that devs lie and exaggerate all the time, anti-consumer practices shouldn't be excused just because lots of companies do it. I fully expected this game to be mediocre and not live up to any of its promises because it felt like Spore all over again, but I still maintained a sliver of hope because the premise was cool.

OT: If Steam were to give special exceptions for NMS, then they'd have to take a very long look at their entire catalog. NMS is far from the worst case of false advertising in gaming, it just happens to be one of the most publicized.
Sorry but, none of that reads like lies to me, it just doesn't. Games change in development all the time. None of us were there, and none of us know how things went down, and I'd rather not speculate just because people didn't enjoy it. I don't see people saying Irrational lied to us because Elizabeth didn't turn out to be telekinetic in Bioshock Infinite, or that Booker wasn't voiced by Stephen Russel.

I love the feeling of landing on a new world and knowing that no human being has ever set foot there before and most likely no one ever will again. I love slowly chipping away at the lore, at the tiny details interactions with aliens and ruins reveal about you, about them, about the universe. I love the sense of vast isolation, and the pervasive feeling/story hints that universe is very old, maybe even dying, or at least passing out of an era of great civilization. I love how the resource management and tech upgrades are kept simple, just enough of a nudge in the background to keep you moving. I love the genuinely different atmosphere's of the planets I've visited, garden moons of dense floating islands rising out of the fog over the low seas, radioactive wastelands of colossal arches and only the most basic scrub life, sparse forests giving way to razor peaks on the edge of an ocean, deep red trees and ferns stretching off under an endless torrential downpour for as far as the eye can see.

This is what I was promised, and it's exactly what I got. If I want to shoot things I've got games for that. If I want to trade things I've got games for that. But if I want to explore the genuinely unknown, I've really only got one. It isn't trying to be a blockbuster and it isn't trying to please everyone, and that means a lot of people aren't gonna enjoy it. I don't think that's because of anything it does 'wrong' though. It's just how it works.

It just is what it is, and you may enjoy it if you like that sort of thing. Or not. Who knows?
 

SeventhSigil

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Even when I was really irritated at the amount of stuff missing/stripped down/dumbed down/downgraded compared to virtually every interview and video that was available before release, I had chalked it up to Murray basically being a successor to Molyneux. I.e., not malicious or deliberately setting out to mislead others, but rather simply careless, excitable and probably not the brightest when it comes to managing people as opposed to formulas. =P

But the day before the PS4 release, Murray made a blog post that seemed aimed towards setting the record straight. And on the surface, he seemed to describe the game for what it is, today. He even said, flat-out 'No PVP Multiplayer.' Sure, he didn't mention any OTHER content cuts had been made over the last three to four years, but again, EA and Ubisoft avoid sharing unpleasant truths too, fair enough...

Except the end of that blog post had him sharing and endorsing two fan-made guides filled to the brim with outdated, inaccurate, and entirely incorrect information. He even referred to them as pretty good guides to what No Man's Sky is about. One of the links was from 2014, both were based on information that came from Murray's various interviews, and they included ideas like how it was one persistent galaxy, rather than lots of little solar system 'boxes' with no real sun and skyboxes, etc.

So, to summarize, Sean talks about all this cool stuff, then over the course of development, a lot of it gets cut or stripped down, fair enough... and then, a day before release, he tells everyone "Hey, guys, read these guides that talk about all the cool stuff I've said is in the game!"

And the weird thing is... he didn't HAVE to. Nobody asked him to share those links, or share any links, or even write the entire blog post. The threads these guides were in were no longer active, or prominently placed. He went out of his way to take sources of information that would most definitely lead people astray, dusted them off, then offered them up for public consumption.

******

Now, that could just mean we've actually found a new level of Molyneux-ing, a person SO careless and SO shortsighted he's helping blow his game out of proportion right up until launch day. It still doesn't necessarily indicate Sean's malicious. ...not suited to ever head PR for a game project ever again, maybe, but not malicious.

Except then there's the game itself. All the hype around what's at the center, and why? Because it was a secret. People love mysteries, love knowing what the answer to a particular riddle is, and most of all, a lot of people love EARNING that answer. Not spoiling themselves, not looking it up on Youtube except for maybe some early gameplay videos just to get their 'space legs,' but instead patiently hoofing it all the way through til the end so it can have the maximum possible impact. The moment someone says 'the game is full of secrets,' (oh, look, Sean said that right before release too,) many people are going to go on a general blackout specifically to avoid spoilers, to avoid learning the answers to these secrets before it's the 'right time.'

Foolish? Yeah, and I do include myself in that statement. =P I wanted to be surprised, wanted to be shocked... and boy did I ever, though not in the way I'd hoped. Because all of No Man's Sky's secrets are rubbish. It's why most of the time someone spoiler warnings what's at the center, it's with the addendum 'But seriously, you SHOULD have this spoiled.'

I won't go into specifics, but the center? HA. Conclusion of the Atlas Path? Rather underwhelming, and at this point it's uncertain if the thing the game claims happens ACTUALLY happens, or if it's just flavor text. What's locked behind the rooms sealed behind the difficult-to-obtain V2 and V3s of the Atlas Pass? One spoiler, there's nothing new or even astoundingly useful that would explain why the higher level passes can be such a pain in the butt to get. Where does the 'Abandoned Buildings' situation with the weird wall-goo go? Apparently nowhere! Those things are scattered everywhere and dispense lore and tech blueprints.

But even though these things, once revealed, are rather trash, as secrets they have just enough potential to intrigue a new player. For someone starting out, these elements suggest that their journey is just beginning. That as they progress, deeper and deeper towards the center, these planted seeds will sprout into something spectacular, or at least something mildly interesting. And... they don't. Ever. And because of the sheer size of even the opening galaxy, the 'Well, maybe if I get closer to the center things will change!' delusion can feel like a valid one for many hours. x_X

*******

So yeah. Kind of feel like Murray realized that, at the end of the day, you don't actually need to have something cool hidden behind a velvet curtain, at least when it comes to Day One sales. All you need to do is have the velvet curtain itself, do a little dance, waggle your fingers, say 'What's behind heeeeere, ooooOOOOooooOOOoooo' to get people curious. Then you charge full retail price to look behind the curtain. Plenty of people will just wait til someone took a camera phone pic of what was being hidden there, of course, in order to see if they want to pay in order to get a look behind the curtain themselves. But others would line up to PERSONALLY get a shot at seeing what was back there, not wanting the 'surprise' to be ruined by a secondhand source.

Then those folks see that there's a couple of buckets and a mop behind the curtain, and turn to see Sean hoofing it down the aisle as fast as his legs can carry him. =P