The Business Side of Video (Space) Games EXCLUSIVELY ON IDLE THUMBS

[Bjorn]

I've never begrudged Valve for not having a refund system from the get-go. Because I can understand why it's hard to set up. It's digital products, one of the easiest things to 'steal.' Like you have to come to a decision about how people can download a product, then change their mind but retain the data despite not having access via your authentication system. Because it can be circumvented, if not now then later. Like are you okay with that? And businesses kinda shouldn't be. But at the same time, I do believe in returns being an option. Not an indefinite option (I work retail for a living, I get sick of that shit), but an option nonetheless.

 

And I just assume that anyone who is willing to try and scam Valve/developers by returning games is someone who would almost certainly be willing to pirate a game (it would be faster and easier).  The people who want to steal digital goods already have a tremendous smorgasbord of content to steal at their leisure.  The people most hurt by a no refund policy are the honest consumers. 

[Merus]

I can tell you, as of a little over a year ago, Valve staunchly denies that purchasing an early-access game constitutes purchasing a product to which any consumer rights can adhere, especially a refund. 

 

Like I said earlier, this isn't an attitude that can fly in every territory. Australia consumer protection law is omnipresent - if you take money for a product from an Australian, you're liable.

 

This is one of the reasons why distributors exist; it's infeasible for most companies to be familiar with everyone's different laws, and different cultures have very different opinions about how financial transactions should work. (I'm suddenly struck by a thought: do any online storefronts actually support haggling?)

[Bjorn]

This is one of the reasons why distributors exist; it's infeasible for most companies to be familiar with everyone's different laws, and different cultures have very different opinions about how financial transactions should work. (I'm suddenly struck by a thought: do any online storefronts actually support haggling?)

 

eBay lets sellers to allow buyers to make an offer, and you can trade offers back and forth.  And even if you don't allow offers to be directly made, if someone asks you a question, you can reply with an offer price that's different than the shown price. 

[Deadpan]

I'm curious how this policy might change based on use, because it looks like at the moment there's very little in the way of people buying, finishing and refunding games that just happen to be shorter than two hours. Like, Cameron Kunzelman has just released a short narrative game that only takes about an hour to finish if you don't want to see every possible path, nook and cranny, and he's been tweeting about this worriedly a bunch.

 

Or does that mean people can now reviewbomb things on Steam by buying something, writing about it, and then immediately refunding it?

 

The common wisdom is that Valve will have thought about this somehow or is bound to make changes when something is obviously broken, but I'm not sure if that's really the case anymore what with the state they left Greenlight and the Curation system in.

[Mangela Lansbury]

The common wisdom is that Valve will have thought about this somehow or is bound to make changes when something is obviously broken, but I'm not sure if that's really the case anymore what with the state they left Greenlight and the Curation system in.

I'm pretty sure the common wisdom is that Valve flies by the seat of its pants and does things without really thinking them through. I mean, their in house economist was only qualified to manage the finances of Greece after he left. Look how they're doing.

[Bjorn]

I really think that concerns about abuse of returns systems are far overblown and only serve demonstrate developers lack of experience with retail. 

 

Yes, fraud does happen, just like shoplifting happens in physical stores and piracy happens online.  You can mitigate these things to the best of your ability, but you can't eliminate them.  But ultimately, fraud represents a pretty small percentage of returns.  And with something like Steam, most common/damaging types of fraud aren't even possible (like "returning" a stolen item or trying to return a broken thing as though it were the new thing so you get a free replacement). 

 

Just going off the data from my business, over the last decade and hundreds of thousands of individual transactions, I can only think of about a dozen times that I was fairly sure someone was trying to fraudulently return something.  And the nature of what we sell makes it fairly easy to try that. 

[syntheticgerbil]

My experience in retail is that people who do weird things like dig receipts out of the trash and try to pick up the item in the store to return it for some cash are so few that it is probably a negligible expense to appease them and go home. It takes a human being with not only a bunch of time on their hands for petty theft but also a certain amount of guts. Most people just don't want to bother that much.

 

And with digital downloads you can track someone's account and see if they have a habit of making a returns for maybe lofty reasons.

 

Also I am very bad. A long while ago I was watching the Alien Quadrilogy boxset and disc 8 was defective and would not play. I had bought it over a year before from Amazon used so I was shit out of luck. I went to a local retailer and bought the boxset again, swapped the defective disc, reshrinkwrapped it at Kinko's, and returned it the next day.

[Mangela Lansbury]

All the stories I've heard about renting something from Fry's -- a big box electronics retailer with a lax enough return policy that people will buy products with a task in mind and return them once that task is complete -- are probably indicative of a not insubstantial subset of people who would buy games with the intent of returning them if they knew that was an option.

[Badfinger]

My experience in retail is that people who do weird things like dig receipts out of the trash and try to pick up the item in the store to return it for some cash are so few that it is probably a negligible expense to appease them and go home. It takes a human being with not only a bunch of time on their hands for petty theft but also a certain amount of guts. Most people just don't want to bother that much.

 

Straight along that line, people who are pro-consumer and pro developer (me among them) have long touted digital distribution and cited Steam directly, saying that the best way to curb casual piracy is to make buying less of a hassle than stealing. Having a return policy should make developers jump for joy knowing that avenue just got slightly more broad. If you are making a real, working product that people want to buy, you are not hamstrung by the people making broken garbage bullshit that shows up directly next to your product. If there's no way to avoid being duped, then you the consumer are going to be more wary and maybe choose to not make any purchases or only purchases that your brain thinks are 100% safe. There is now some recourse for spending money on what is essentially fraud coming from the other direction.

[Dewar]

Like I said earlier, this isn't an attitude that can fly in every territory. Australia consumer protection law is omnipresent - if you take money for a product from an Australian, you're liable.

 

This is one of the reasons why distributors exist; it's infeasible for most companies to be familiar with everyone's different laws, and different cultures have very different opinions about how financial transactions should work. (I'm suddenly struck by a thought: do any online storefronts actually support haggling?)

 

This makes me curious about the particulars of Australian (and a I guess European laws as well.)  If you were to buy an off-the-shelf computer game, open it up, install it, and then want to return it to a game store, would they have to accept it? What about opened Xbox One games?

 

While I realize that our consumer protections in the USA are garbage, I've also been trained by them (as well as my own guilt I guess) to assume that anything I buy that doesn't work right is my own fault, either because I'm not using it right or I didn't do the sufficient research ahead of time to ensure it was what I wanted. For better or worse, if I bought an early access game and it never completed or came out broken, it feels like that's my bad for taking a risk.

[Henroid]

My experience in retail is that people who do weird things like dig receipts out of the trash and try to pick up the item in the store to return it for some cash are so few that it is probably a negligible expense to appease them and go home. It takes a human being with not only a bunch of time on their hands for petty theft but also a certain amount of guts. Most people just don't want to bother that much.

 

And with digital downloads you can track someone's account and see if they have a habit of making a returns for maybe lofty reasons.

 

Also I am very bad. A long while ago I was watching the Alien Quadrilogy boxset and disc 8 was defective and would not play. I had bought it over a year before from Amazon used so I was shit out of luck. I went to a local retailer and bought the boxset again, swapped the defective disc, reshrinkwrapped it at Kinko's, and returned it the next day.

It's not, at all. My employer went over a lot of data with me and it's fucked up how often it happens, and how much of an impact it actually has.

[SuperBiasedMan]

There's a degree of caveat emptor here in Ireland. It's not 100% a company must provide you with a totally fitting product for your needs. The way it works for the most part is companies shouldn't mislead you and must make an effort to compensate when a product flat out doesn't function as advertised through no fault of the consumer.

How that's determined is a whole big thing, but it's important to have the mentality that you expect companies to provide a certain amount of after sale service as standard.

Also for the record, it's not a legal obligation to offer returns if the product does work. but a lot of places do offer it because it's offering better service.

[Gormongous]

Like I said earlier, this isn't an attitude that can fly in every territory. Australia consumer protection law is omnipresent - if you take money for a product from an Australian, you're liable.

 

This is one of the reasons why distributors exist; it's infeasible for most companies to be familiar with everyone's different laws, and different cultures have very different opinions about how financial transactions should work. (I'm suddenly struck by a thought: do any online storefronts actually support haggling?)

 

Yeah, I know. Valve was (and probably still is) arguing from the position that early access isn't a product at all, it's a unilateral service agreement that is completely unrelated to the working game that is or is not delivered. If I didn't make it clear in the previous post, I think it's a bizarre and shyster-ish stance to take, although I understand that the status of early access games is precarious enough that Valve wants to nail it down, even through an unenforceable legal position.

[Deadpan]

I share your general optimism about this introduction and agree it's probably not that big of an issue, but can we really substitute digital and retail for each other that completely, especially given how that coincides with differences in the manner of thing people are buying? Somebody might go buy a hammer for one single task like "I want to hammer in a nail for this one painting I bought," but it's still a useful item to have around afterwards. You might buy a dress and return it after wearing it out once, but the thing that's stopping you from keeping it is probably entirely a monetary concern, not that the dress is now literally spent. But to a lot of people, I think, there's very little appeal to keeping around a piece of media they have already consumed, so to them this refund policy might be less analogous to "I have the option of returning a physical item I bought" and more akin to "I can get a refund for a meal I have already consumed"

 

It still takes a certain gutsy terribleness (and spectacular commitment to very low-level fraud) to do that, but there's arguably less of a mental block to doing something like that when the "Oh this thing might come in handy one day or another" justification for the puchase falls away.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I'm also inclined to think the potential for abuse exists among an entitled audience with a warped view of the price of their media.

[Bjorn]

I'm also inclined to think the potential for abuse exists among an entitled audience with a warped view of the price of their media.

 

Okay, that's an entirely fair assessment of the Steam user base and cause for concern. 

[itsamoose]

I can't say for certain how the return policy will affect sales numbers and the like, but I am primarily concerned about how it affects game design.  Since Valve's return policy is only valid for 2 hours, are developers going to be pressured to make games where the first two hours is more filler than anything?  I don't think it is going to ruin games as we know it, but it will become another bullshit metric that investors and like will start to want you to cater to specifically, which can be a problem.  Then take episodic games for example.  If a player plays episode 2, which only takes say an hour and a half and then returns it, should I then go in and retroactively adjust their save file so they couldn't then pick up episode 3 and continue on as if nothing happened?  Again, not going to ruin games but I don't think this policy fixes a problem so much as it trades one problem for a host of others.  Now let's say I want to release an expansion pack, the content of which can't be accessed until late/end game.  What about releasing a weapon pack or something of that nature, how does the return policy factor in to that?  What about packing in a game demo with another release, does time spent playing the demo count toward the return time?  Do people get to keep the demo after returning the game?  It isn't difficult to see the various situations where this return policy could be a problem, and to counter those problems developers will have to do some pretty anti-consumer or unpopular things as a result.

 

I think ultimately what is going to happen is that developers for larger to mid size studios will start having online components to their games simply to account for this return policy, or institute other types of DRM.  I mean I still think that steam should have a return policy, but to base that policy on the amount of time played/time of ownership only serves neither developer nor consumer, particularly considering how diverse games can be from one another.  From my experience and those I have talked to, these kinds of problems will generally mean that new and experimental things just may no longer happen due to the extra work and concerns that result from it.

[rohlfinator]

Certainly Valve (and really the whole industry) have cultivated a culture of devaluing games, but on the other hand, I wonder if the industry's caveat emptor approach is one of the contributors to that. I often wait for price drops because I know there's some degree of risk involved with buying a PC game.

 

As for abuse -- it seems like a bit of a hassle to:

- buy a game from Steam for full price

- play it less than 2 hours, or concoct a reason for a refund

- email Steam support

- wait for up to a week to get your money back

- risk getting your account flagged if you do this too often

 

It's still probably simpler for the unscrupulous customer to pirate and avoid all that stuff entirely.

[Merus]

This makes me curious about the particulars of Australian (and a I guess European laws as well.)  If you were to buy an off-the-shelf computer game, open it up, install it, and then want to return it to a game store, would they have to accept it? What about opened Xbox One games?

 

It sounds like it's similar to Ireland; you can only return it if the game is faulty (doesn't work, damaged, isn't what it says it is). The claims that are relevant can both made by the product and by the supplier, but they're claims made about the fitness of purpose of the product, not about quality, so if you don't like a game but it's functional. The supplier is protected in the case of an Aliens: Colonial Marines, if they tell the consumer beforehand about defects.

[Vainamoinen]

We've been discussing this at length over at the RTG forum. Ragnar Tørnquist sees particularly shorter, more narrative driven games endangered (in a series of tweets), and I tend to agree here. And Valve is not careful about fostering abuse. In fact, they encourage clear cut abuse by defining it as not being abuse:
 

Abuse
Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.

 

 

I wonder what Telltale has to say to this, as it could be quite threatening to their business model. Their 'first episodes' are quite often less than two hours nowadays. Season pass means that players feel like owning five episodes, but not getting 80% of their purchase for months. Participation in sales during a running Season is normal for Telltale. What keeps customers from playing the first episode, then handing the game back and wait for the summer sale?

 

Valve has vowed to improve their support... and ta-dah, they're doing it on the backs of developers. SURPRISE.

 

God forbid they hire more staff, god forbid.

[Twig]

edit: changed my mind i don't feel like getting into this shit

[Bjorn]

Yeah, that's literally just a sale-price matching guarantee, which has been a feature of retail policies at a lot of stores for decades (I remember stores advertising that when I was a kid).  The other criteria still apply, you can't have played the game more than 2 hours and it can't be more than 2 weeks later.  It's literally just there so you don't feel ripped off by a game going on sale a couple of days after you buy it. 

[JonCole]

I think that the Telltale example is particularly strange. Telltale regularly heavily discounts the first episode of their running series, because it acts as a platform to download the other episodes as DLC and it effectively operates as a demo. Why someone would buy the first episode, return it, and then proceed to wait 4-5 months for the next sale to experience the rest is beyond my understanding. I feel like the far more likely scenario is that person avoids buying the game at full price for a couple months, buys the first episode at a discount when the second episode comes out, and then waits a couple more months for the season pass to be on sale.

 

And yeah, I agree with Bjorn in that returns/refunds based on sale-pricing is common practice in retail. Amazon will sometimes refund you the difference in purchase price and sale price as long as a month after original purchase. Retailers often ban people due to abusive behavior, I know of a lot of people who flip games between retailers (buy used at one place, trade-in for more elsewhere) who have been banned from places like Gamestop because their unusual trades ding GS's database one too many times.

[Merus]

edit: changed my mind i don't feel like getting into this shit

 

Yeah, I'm reminded of how long and loud developers complained about rentals and the second-hand market, two things that pretty much every other entertainment industry seems to take in its stride.

[Gaizokubanou]

Refund system is needed but I feel for those who might suffer cause of the 2 hour time because their game is meant to be cheap and short~

 

https://twitter.com/qwiboo/status/607234020372418560

 

Hope something like that isn't caused by the 2 hour window : /

 

 

I know of a lot of people who flip games between retailers (buy used at one place, trade-in for more elsewhere) who have been banned from places like Gamestop because their unusual trades ding GS's database one too many times.

 

I didn't know that was even possible because last time I traded in at Gamestop, the trade in values were so horrible it was hard to imagine getting games any cheaper than that.  But that was while back so maybe they offer lot better values now?