Adventure Gamers - Forums

Oscar - 23 December 2016 06:49 AM

I’m thrilled to see that Steam has just been fined $3 million for not offering a proper refund policy. Sure, it’s only one country, but it’s a start. Their habit of putting out buggy, incomplete games while advertising them as complete is absurd (hi Barrow Hill: The Dark Path) and hopefully this will prompt them to change it.

It’s not Steam that does that, it’s the developer/publisher.

Oscar - 23 December 2016 06:49 AM

I’m thrilled to see that Steam has just been fined $3 million for not offering a proper refund policy. Sure, it’s only one country, but it’s a start. Their habit of putting out buggy, incomplete games while advertising them as complete is absurd (hi Barrow Hill: The Dark Path) and hopefully this will prompt them to change it.

Steam has had a generous refund policy since June 2015. The fine from Australia is from a court case begun in 2014 that took time to resolve, thus I think Valve is being fined for past non-compliance rather than current.

wilco - 23 December 2016 10:49 AM

It’s not Steam that does that, it’s the developer/publisher.

True, but if a store wants a reputation as being reliable, it still has a responsibility for quality control over what it puts on its shelves. I’m not saying Steam does or doesn’t find the right balance between breadth of content and quality control, just saying that quality control does matter for a store.

Caliburn - 23 December 2016 12:07 PM

Steam has had a generous refund policy since June 2015. The fine from Australia is from a court case begun in 2014 that took time to resolve, thus I think Valve is being fined for past non-compliance rather than current.

Generous? “The game must be played for less than two hours” - putting aside the fact that if you alt-tab out of the game the clock keeps ticking, it was not difficult to be running around in circles in Barrow Hill 2 for a lot longer than that before it was evident that it was a bug stopping me from proceeding rather than player error.

I have my PC on all the time and alt-tab a LOT and would say I logged over 10 hours before I realised that BH2 was too buggy to be able to get past the first part of the game. Steam effectively wants you to be a beta-tester without your consent. I don’t have time for that and I didn’t agree to it.

If you read the verdict, the case means that Valve cannot limit consumer law in any circumstances, so I doubt its refund policy will hold up (at least in Australia). Which is how it should be - it is national consumer law which dictates refund policy, not Valve.

I used to prefer GOG because all their games are DRM free but the problem with buying new games on GOG is you never know if the game will be supported with patches and DLC or even have feature parity with the Steam version.
There’s quite a few games that are left in a broken state on gog, while the steam versions got fixed a long time ago. Because of this I don’t feel secure buying new game releases on GOG.
Here’s a list of games that have not gotten patches and stuff on GOG

At least with steam you know your game will get all the updates and content, and truth be told you can remove the Steam requirement from most of the games very easily anyways.

I don’t like either one of them.

Bit by bit GOG has chewed away at everything I used to like about them.
It’s very rare that they get in a new “classic” older game any more.
They also refuse to stock many new adventure games and are rude to the developers of games they aren’t interested in, sometimes not even bothering to reply to them. COWCAT is not the only developer who’s had that experience.

GOG claims their games are “DRM-free” but embeds Galaxy hooks in their games, including those games acquired from the GOG website as direct downloads using a web browser rather than through Galaxy. I suspect this is part of the reason some of their games haven’t received patches—because they’d have to be “re-Galaxy-hooked” and can’t simply be patched like a normal game.

I never asked GOG for a client. If I’d wanted a client, I’d have used Steam and had a much more complete selection of games to choose from. I consider the lack of a client to be one of the advantages of a DRM-free game, so I certainly don’t want the “hooks” of an unwanted client embedded in any so-called DRM-free games I buy. GOG claims the “hooks” won’t do anything if you don’t have Galaxy installed, but they’ve done nothing recently to make me take their word for it. Instead they just have more and more sales I’m not interested in looking at because I know they’ve embedded unwanted junk in their games that makes them harder to patch.

Iznogood - 28 December 2016 08:57 PM

rtrooney - 28 December 2016 06:36 PM

wilco - 23 December 2016 10:49 AM

It’s not Steam that does that, it’s the developer/publisher.

I’m not doubting the veracity of your statement. But I’m trying to think of what possible motivation a developer/publisher could possibly have to deliver a buggy/incomplete game to Steam. If you know the answer, please educate me.

The same reason that they have to deliver a buggy/incomplete game to any other distribution platform (Proper testing cost money)

It is not like the same game is more buggy on Steam than it is on GOG or any other place, in fact Steam will usually receive and roll out the patches much quicker than GOG.

What Iznogood said.
Testers now are early adopters. I don’t think it’s Steam job to quality control all the games in there. But they need refund policy like any store.

One of the main reasons I have noticed that developers put out buggy old crap on Steam (and sometimes on GOG as well), is that the game is picked up by a new publisher, but the developer is out of business, or has moved on to new projects.
Some examples that really frustrate me are (anything Kheops that is not Return to Mysterious Island or Voyage), A Vampyre Story, and even Still Life. In all these cases, the developers are gone, and the lazy publishers don’t want to spend any resources hiring a few engineers to retrofit the games to new systems.

I don’t blame the developer at all. It’s a decision to release an unmistakably buggy game, but with that must go the consequence of accepting refunds for a game clearly not fit for purpose. That is Steam’s responsibility.

Oscar - 30 December 2016 04:37 AM

I don’t blame the developer at all. It’s a decision to release an unmistakably buggy game, but with that must go the consequence of accepting refunds for a game clearly not fit for purpose. That is Steam’s responsibility.

And they already do that. Full refund for up to 2 weeks, if you put less than 2 hours into the game. What is their alternative? To give you as much time as you want to figure out the game is broken? How many people will abuse this?
Developers of smaller games will be hurt significantly, because it is very likely that many people will just buy the small game, finish it, and then get a refund.

I do think though that Valve should have a minimum amount of QA for a game put out. Like to check if the game even starts on a modern system, or that the very first screen does not flicker like a strobe light.

SoccerDude28 - 30 December 2016 12:28 PM

Oscar - 30 December 2016 04:37 AM

I don’t blame the developer at all. It’s a decision to release an unmistakably buggy game, but with that must go the consequence of accepting refunds for a game clearly not fit for purpose. That is Steam’s responsibility.

And they already do that. Full refund for up to 2 weeks, if you put less than 2 hours into the game. What is their alternative? To give you as much time as you want to figure out the game is broken? How many people will abuse this?

GOG gives 30 days. And look, let’s be honest - if people wanted to get a game for free, piracy is always an option. (And in BH2’s case, a better option if you ask me, and one I wish I’d been smart enough to take).