Players Seek 'No Man's Sky' Refunds, Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves (tweaktown.com) 467
thegarbz writes: As was covered previously on Slashdot the very hyped up game No Man's Sky was released to a lot of negative reviews about game-crashing bugs and poor interface choices. Now that players have had more time to play the game it has become clear that many of the features hyped by developers are not present in the game, and users quickly started describing the game as "boring".
Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."
In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."
Now, likely due to misleading advertising, Steam has begun allowing refunds for No Man's Sky regardless of playtime, and there are reports of players getting refunds on the Play Station Network as well despite Sony's strict no refund policy. Besides Sony, Amazon is also issuing refunds, according to game sites. In response, Sony's former Strategic Content Director, Shahid Kamal Ahmad, wrote on Twitter, "If you're getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours you're a thief." He later added "Here's the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry."
In a follow-up he acknowledged it was fair to consider a few hours lost to game-breaking crashes, adding "Each case should be considered on its own merits and perhaps I shouldn't be so unequivocal."
It's Sony - duh (Score:2, Troll)
Who would ever buy from Sony again, they've bungled many a product. BetaMax, MemoryCard, UMD, MiniDisc, BMG Rootkit, PS3 OtherOS, PS Vita, PSN hacks and pretty much all of their products are more expensive and have less features than competitors.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony did not develop No Man's Sky. It's also fairly accurate to say that if someone invests 50 hours into a game and then wants a refund...calling them a thief isn't too far off base. That's the same for any retail business out there. If you bought a game and want a refund after an hour or two of trying to get things to work right, that's perfectly fine. 50 hours? No way.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, when gamers buy a game, and like it, they don't request a refund. Even if it is a short game and they beat it within 8 hours...if that was their expectation and they liked the game, they usually put it aside and forget it.
SOME gamers are assholes who want to get everything for free, but the industry survives because they are not the majority.
This game got overwhelmingly negative reviews and significant numbers of gamers are all demanding a refund. These are the same gamers that usually don't demand a refund. They didn't suddenly become thieves, they felt lied-to and ripped off, and are asking for a refund.
No thievery here at all, neither legal nor social.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Bollocks.
1) If you buy a game you buy it for life (digital does not rot), so if at any time it seems to stop working properly - especially if it never works too well in the first few weeks after release - you should be entitled to a refund.
2) If you're a srs enthusiast, you'll be hammering the servers for a couple of weekends, which could easily add up to 50 hours of "play"time. That doesn't even mean you're getting a decent experience, just that you're putting up with it and waiting for an improvement that doesn't arrive.
3) A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent without the intention of returning it. Since any physical copy would have to be returned in order to process a refund, and nothing is being taken from the owner at all if the purchase was digital, there is no theft. Since there is no exchange of ANYTHING without consent when a refund is issued, there is no theft. Since there is nothing dishonest about asking for and getting a refund, there is no theft. A lesson in law or ethics might help u here.
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A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent, regardless of whether or not they plan on returning it.
FTFY
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Not in English law (and some legal systems derived from it), matey.
TWOCing ("taking without consent") is a separate offence in English law, often used for vehicles which are "borrowed" but then returned, because the Theft Act 1968 requires a lack of intention to return.
There is a blatant ethical and social difference between borrowing something without the owner's permission, and depriving the owner of something permanently without their permission. In the former case, if the item is returned in as-found co
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Like most FTFY, your "fix" is less correct than the original.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:4, Funny)
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I did not say that taking a mobile object without the consent of the owner with the intent to return the item was legal. I only said that it is not stealing.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:4, Insightful)
What matters is the intent, mens rea, the will to steal, and the intent to permanently deprave the rightful owner of his use of the item. This is critical. Without, you could become a thief without even wanting to steal anything, by mistake and accident, and I hope we can agree that this is not the intent of the law!
Allow me to show a counter example.
You are in a meeting and you have the habit of putting your cell phone on the table because it's uncomfortable in your pocket. After the meeting, you pick up your cell phone and go back, only to notice in your office that you forgot to take your cell phone along, it's on your office table, and you swiped the cell phone of someone else who just happened to have the same habit and the same phone model. Are you a thief?
According to your original statement a few postings up from this one,
"A thief takes something away from the owner dishonestly without the owner's consent, regardless of whether or not they plan on returning it."
you would be.
Maybe that's why they don't let you word laws.
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Taking something without permission with bad faith, the intent to keep it and the intent to deprive the original owner of its use.
Depending on what is missing from that list it may be a different crime or no crime altogether.
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The law puts a lot of emphasis on your intent. This is hard to prove and even harder to disprove in most cases, but intent makes a huge difference, not in the way whether something is legal or illegal (usually) but in the way how you'll be punished.
Most strikingly this is visible in laws concerning the killing of people. Your intent, and nothing else, is the difference between murder and manslaughter.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Experience isn't physical, yet it's something you can buy. When you purchase a game, beat it, and then return it after spending dozens or hundreds of hours playing the title, you've enriched yourself with that experience -- an experience you wouldn't have had otherwise.
You may not be returning something physical, but our concept of property isn't solely tied to physicality. That's why intellectual property is a thing. Now, I suppose if you're fundamentally against the existence of IP you can argue that theft doesn't exist -- but I find this a limited definition that doesn't really match reality. If playing a prerecorded song for hundreds of people at an event can count as infringement (and it does) despite the fact that nothing physical has been stolen or removed, then clearly property has more than a physical component.
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I don't see how your conclusion follows from your argument. Yes, doing something illegal can count as infringement even if nothing has been stolen or removed. What does that have to do with property? Not all crimes are property-related.
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It's also fairly accurate to say that if someone invests 50 hours into a game and then wants a refund...calling them a thief isn't too far off base.
That depends if they were looking for an advertised feature that the developers knew wasn't there but were intentionally vague about it anyway.
I mean we're talking about a game that even has an online play written on the box along with PEGI age restriction which is automatically applied to online games which interact with other characters. Except you won't see this unless you look under the sticker they stuck over it.
http://www.gamesradar.com/no-m... [gamesradar.com]
Time is not a metric that comes into play for intentionall
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Informative)
The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release. Then even after release they continued to lie about it. When two players went to the same place at the same time to see each other (something the developers had continually insisted was possible), the developers pretended it was a bug - even though they knew damn well that it was physically impossible. The game has no real-time net traffic needed to support multiplayer and there is no serious player model included in the game files (there's a couple comical temporary development models [geek.com] in there, along with a monkey in a hat, the Fallout logo, and a bunch of other amusing stuff, mind you).
The reason that so many people played for so long before seeking refunds was because the developers kept insisting that things were in the game that most definitely weren't. And they put in this huge "grind" to try to slow everyone down, to drag out how long it would take for them to find this out. When a player playing nonstop for 20 hours managed to reach the center of the galaxy (the goal) on the same day as release, going through the relentless over-and-over clicking to do so, the developer's "solution" to the "problem" was to cut the distance you travel per warp by a third, tripling the clicky busywork. And they introduced a bug at the exact same time they did so.
And BTW, after being told that everything's at the center of the galaxy - that the creatures get weirder, there's more going on there, that there's a big exciting ending there, you know what's actually there? Absolutely nothing. You go to the center and the game actually punishes you. There's no ending, just an animation of you flying out of the center and it crash lands you in the next galaxy, which is no different from the current one.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Informative)
(Some of the videos taking on the subject are really [youtube.com] quite [youtube.com] brutal / amusing [youtube.com] )
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"The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied,"
By developers, you mean Sean Murray, yes?
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Well yes, he was the one taking point on everything. Who knows what other people in the company thought.
If I was a programmer for HG, I'd be pretty mad about how he's managed this whole thing.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Informative)
> The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release
Sadly this is correct. Summary of the all the things promised but not delivered, along with things that did make it:
http://www.onemanslie.info/the... [onemanslie.info]
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends. If they find out at the end that a killer bug means you can't complete it, or if you try everything figuring that killer feature they advertised has to be unlocked only to find that it just isn't there., returning after 50 hours may be perfectly fair.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:4, Insightful)
That it's marginally more entertaining than solitaire doesn't mean it's theft to return a game that isn't as was described when sold. Hell, VW is taking cars back *years* after they were sold and well used, because they weren't as advertised.
Apparently fraud to sell is OK in your world, but returning something when it's discovered isn't.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:4, Informative)
Steam will count in-game pause as "gameplay". I learned that the hard way when I tried to return a game. Steam counts the executable being open as "gameplay". Someone who walks away in a long load screen and doesn't come back until after a leisurely dinner may have never seen any gameplay, yet be out of the return period.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Insightful)
50 hours? No way.
You could spend 50 hours in NMS just looking for any of the 100 missing promised features. Sure it's not all a lie? Surely it's there somewhere? Dammit.
The marketing for this product was likely illegal under most nations' consumer protection laws - heck, it was so blatant that even under US law they probably crossed the line. When a product is "not fit for purpose", playtime isn't a relevant factor. If Sony's giving refunds, it's only because their legal team told them to stay clear of fraud. I'll give Steam credit for actually caring about customer trust.
Re:It's Sony - duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sony did not develop No Man's Sky. It's also fairly accurate to say that if someone invests 50 hours into a game and then wants a refund...calling them a thief isn't too far off base. That's the same for any retail business out there. If you bought a game and want a refund after an hour or two of trying to get things to work right, that's perfectly fine. 50 hours? No way.
Maybe Sony should install a rootkit on their computer... you know since they are probably criminals anyways.
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If you bought a game and want a refund after an hour or two of trying to get things to work right, that's perfectly fine. 50 hours? No way.
You're forgetting the part where the developer, lying, told users 'There's lots out there you just have to explore and find it!' - Some were more trusting of this than others and spent more time exploring trying to find these things that, it turns out, don't actually exist in the game. Spending 50 hours being naive doesn't mean you're a thief while the person who clued in after 8 hours isn't. Both are victims of fraud and deserve their refunds.
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Reminds me of an old post of mine...
https://it.slashdot.org/commen... [slashdot.org]
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The same people who keep buying from Electronic Arts?
The only thieves here... (Score:4, Insightful)
...are Hello Games and Sony. They both knew they had a steaming turd of a game, they released it for full price anyway and expected people to just put up with it.
At least Valve has the integrity to do the right thing, refund players their money for a game that is broken, has none of the features its now-secluded big mouth Sean Murray claimed and if it were fixed, if it were bug free, it would still be a title that would normally go for free-to-play for PSN subscribers.
Really starting to re-think whether or not I'll be buying a console for gaming in the future...
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Indeed, at least PC users have mods, like "Low Flight" (takes off the game's annoying "training wheels" that take any semblance of fun out of flying over a planet) and "Big Things" (so that trees and rocks can be bigger than the tiny default ~7 meter maximum)
Given the reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/... [breitbart.com]
A walking simulator on 18 million planets.
It's not surprising anyone wants their money back. It's also kind of hard to see how anyone "Stole" the content unless it was the same planet 18 million times.
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The title doesn't do the rest of the review justice where he said
The game recalls “walking simulators” but without the curated experience or careful narrative structure of the good ones.
So not even as good as some walking simulators.
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http://www.breitbart.com/tech/... [breitbart.com]
A walking simulator on 18 million planets.
It's not surprising anyone wants their money back. It's also kind of hard to see how anyone "Stole" the content unless it was the same planet 18 million times.
That review is on Breibart. Shouldn't they fake a video of interesting gameplay and claim it's great?
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http://www.breitbart.com/tech/... [breitbart.com]
A walking simulator on 18 million planets.
It's not surprising anyone wants their money back. It's also kind of hard to see how anyone "Stole" the content unless it was the same planet 18 million times.
I'm a bit out of the loop on this game. Is this not a 'fly around in space exploring the galaxy' game? All the screen shots I've seen have just been on the surfaces of planets.
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Because the "flying around the galaxy" aspect is pretty limited, and deliberately slowed to a crawl.
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It's licensing to use the software, not even buying a copy of it.
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To be fair, the landscapes can often be quite beautiful. The procedural generation algorithm can have its limitations, but it also shows promise. It was just released too soon. It's actually IMHO the best part of the game. The "game" aspects are what are terribly done.
And concerning procedural generation, it was crippled by their lack of optimization, which prevented them from having large plants / animals without making the already bad pop-in unacceptable. So everything is kept small to moderate in si
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For those of us not up on such things, what is "pop in" and why is it a bad thing?
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Pop-in = things suddenly appear in the landscape (landscape features, plants, animals, etc). Not a problem when they're appearing as tiny dots on a distant horizon. BIG problem when they're appearing right in front of you.
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Indeed. While the landscape goes through LOD changes (although way slower than should be necessary, given that they're not doing any physics, no flowing water, nothing of the sort), there's apparently no LOD work with plant and animal models - they're always the same resolution no matter how close or far they are from you. So the game simply can't afford to have too many of them. Not a problem when they're tiny, but when they're big things that should be able to be seen from far away...
Re:Given the reviews (Score:4, Informative)
The game content isn't worth $60 USD. The procedural generation and art style kind of reminded me of Spore. That game is like 8 years old now. Spore was another hugely hyped piece of fail.
Re:Given the reviews (Score:4, Informative)
Had it been released as an experimental indie game with an exploration/screenshot based self-fulfilment motivation as its published gameplay feature, at a price point suited to match, it would've sold very well and not had anywhere near the subsequent negative press.
Unfortunately it's far more profitable to feed the hype engine, suck in a few million gamers to pay full price and treat the small percentage of refunds as a cost of doing business.
The major publishers then wonder why people don't pre-order..
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The problem isn't what it was, it's what it was promised to be. If you look at every public comment by the creator/team, the game doesn't do any of the interesting things that were promised.
http://press-start.com.au/news... [press-start.com.au]
Even key core features are broken, such as naming undiscovered planets getting "lost" by the server.
50 hours of crap. (Score:2, Interesting)
There are some scam games on Steam that are designed to last two hours to get past the refund limit.
No Man's Sky is one of these.
Re:50 hours of crap. (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who have someone escaped the drama associated with NMS and want to learn what all the fuss is about, this review [youtube.com] does a great job of explaining - not just listing the missing features, but showing the emotional impact it had on fans who were incredibly hyped for the game.
There are some scam games on Steam that are designed to last two hours to get past the refund limit.
No Man's Sky is one of these.
I think that may be accidental - at least, I don't credit the devs with the skill to cook that up. The problem here is that the game is missing nearly every promised feature, but there's no way to discover that until you leave the first planet. Then it all turns to shit. The timing, specifically, was likely a coincidence, but Hello Games definitely knew what they were shitting out.
Also, the game crashes frequently even on console, but it can go hours between crashes. For PC, we're used to that sort of shit, and while I think that's still worth a refund, you wouldn't get mass outrage. On the console OTOH, Just Works (TM) is the freaking point of console games.
Still, had the game not been missing almost every promised feature, I think the player base would have been content to wait for a patch to fix the crashes.
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Anyone who didn't realize that two people, starting at random places in a universe where visiting each planet for 1 second would still take billions of years IN REAL TIME, almost would NEVER meet.... doesn't have much common sense.
Well... unless one of the people called the other person and said... where are you? I'm coming over. Lets hook up.
Seriously, you are right, the odds of two groups stumbling into eachother in a world that big is effectively zero. But given that you know for an abolute fact that friends would make the effort join up and explore together, the idea that it would be a long time before the 'lie of multiplayer' was exposed is absurd. Think about it.
I've played several survival type games where you start off random
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You'd have as much luck "meeting up" in Super Mario Brothers. There is no real-time networking traffic and no player models in NMS. The "whoops, there must be a bug" reaction is a baldfaced lie.
And the claim that it's unrealistic to reach the same place are BS. There are not 2^64 stars in the starting galaxy (Euclid), only a few tens of billions. And everyone starts out roughly the same distance from the center, which means that they're all in a narrow spherical shell containing only a tiny fraction of
Dear Mr.Ahmad (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for reminding us all why we should never buy Sony products.
If you don't want customers demanding a refund, maybe you should consider making better products instead of the half baked shite you seem to produce.
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and also thanks for reminding us that Twitter is the place to memorialize things said before thinking. At least you followed-up to soften it a bit after reviewing the, you know, facts. Kudos for that; many Twitter-users who post something stupid would just as soon double-down on whatever idiocy they posted.
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Imagine you are at a restaurant. It takes three hours for your food to arrive, it's not entirely cooked, the potatoes are mushy, the gravy looks like swamp water, but at first it tastes ... okay. Not great, but okay.
Then on the way home you start having stomach cramps.
You spend the night throwing up thanks to food poisoning.
The next day you stagger down to the restaurant to demand some kind of compensation, and all they do is call you a thief because you did eat the food!
How would that make you feel?
In all fairness... (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes about 50 hours to realize the features they promised aren't there. The "universe" is so big you continue to give it a chance, thinking you'll come across the things they promised later.
I haven't been a gamer for well over a decade... (Score:2)
I haven't been a gamer for well over a decade (except whenever a new Civ comes out - when you lose me for a couple of weeks - a tradition since the first Civ) so I don't know if things have changed significantly, but is 50 hours of play time currently considered a lot? Especially with a game described as giving you an infinite procedural universe to explore? But in any case, if he is the *former* Sony director why would this guy's quotes be part of the news story?
Also, if the other post I read where two peo
Clickbait headline (Score:5, Informative)
This guy left Sony in december 2015 [gamesindustry.biz]. Why lie and say "Sony's Content Director Calls Them Thieves" ?
I don't particularly care for Sony (read: I think they're miserable bastards), but come on!
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So he's very clearly the person at Sony who's most invested in the game's reception -- and was in fact the content director responsible for its presence at Sony in the first place.
If you're refusing a refund ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're refusing a refund to a player who hates your game after playing it for 50 hours...
You're the wrong person to be a decision maker.
- You made a game that someone hates after only two days
- After giving your game every chance in the world to live up to what the player expects, after 50 hours of play they can't stand it anymore and never want to play it again
- You defrauded (in the legal sense) consumers who bought your product expecting to get what they were told only to find they weren't.
This is not unusual for Sony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] but it is just another example of a company that HATES ITS CUSTOMERS and wishes they would just SPEND MONEY AND SHUT UP.
I'm sorry, Sony. This is why I gave my PS3 away. This is why I will never ever buy your products.
Those players you've upset... they're not like me. They're fans of your products. They looked forward to this game.
Oops. Not any more.
Public corporations exist to improve shareholder value. Typically this is done with growth and sales. Good luck alienating all your customers and seeing those chickens come home to roost.
Ehud "Sony can kiss my arstechnica" Gavron
Tucson, AZ US
Re:If you're refusing a refund ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have 56 hours of gameplay logged. Just to recap - I've done damned near everything, thoroughly enjoyed myself, and have 56 hours logged. 50 gameplay hours at a game I hate? That would be insane.
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Another reminder of why wait before buying (Score:5, Insightful)
This is another reminder on why one should not buy new games as they come out.
Things like:
Missing features
Huge bugs
A lot of the content moved to DLCs for separate price.
I stopped buying new titles quite many years ago and instead I just wait until they hit the bargain bin, preferably in an all inclusive version that includes all the DLCs maybe two years later. Also the biggest bugs should have been fixed by that time and so on.
In some cases it is hard to wait, but so far I have held fast. Fallout 4 was the recent "difficult to not buy" thing, but since they are almost done with the DLCs for it, I can likely get it some time next year for a more reasonable price for the all DLCs included version.
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Congratulations. You're a grown-up, responsible adult. The rest of the Internet should grow up and follow your example. Thanks.
A lot of truth in that.... (Score:2)
...playing a game for 50 hours and then returning it is much like buying an outfit for a special occasion, wearing it to it, and then returning it.
The sleaze fact is pretty much the same, and the only fact that would mitigate the game playing (and no one has alleged this) is at that point the game then becomes unplayable.
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Allow me to fix the analogy for you:
This is akin to Hugo Boss advertising a suit that is guaranteed to get you laid at one out of three times. You buy it, you wear it to three dates and go "Hmmm... Well, it could be date number 5 and six out of six, right?"
So you go on three more dates. Still haven't been laid. So either you bring it back now, already MUCH too late to return it with any semblance of it being unworn, or you go for three out of nine. Some people are optimists, others desperate...
So who is the
No surprise here (Score:3)
I wonder if his indignat rage goes both ways? (Score:2)
Infringement != theft (Score:2)
Thieves, Eh? (Score:2)
No good-guys here (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, nobody comes out of this one looking particularly well.
No Man's Sky is a mediocre, so-so-ish game. If it had been a $25 indie title that slipped out quietly, it would probably have had a pretty decent reception. But it was hyped, by a developer who appears to want to be the second coming of late-career Peter Molyneux, to be a game that was both fundamentally different to and better than the game that was actually released.
But the people asking for refunds after putting a serious amount of time into the game are also kinda jerks. Digital-purchase refunds have come on a long way in the last couple of years. Weirdly, we have EA to thank for this, as they were the first major party to take the plunge on it, via Origin (hey, credit where it's due). But refund policies set sensible limits. If you've put double-digit hours into a game before deciding you want a refund, you are probably doing something wrong. What's more, the gap between expectations and reality with No Man's Sky was widely known within 24 hours of release. If you got stung because you pre-ordered... then for the love of all that is holy, stop pre-ordering.
And a special de-merit here for much of the gaming media. Quite a few outlets have put more time into defending Hello Games, because gamers are angry with them (boo! hiss! angry gamers! they must all be sexists!) than they have taking them to task for some seriously deceptive marketing.
I did buy it myself. A week or so after launch (so I knew full well what it was like), I managed to get a fairly cheap PC code via cdkeys.com. At the greatly discounted price I paid, the game is more or less worth the money. I put 12 hours or so into it before I got bored and moved on. Mods might add some value to it in time. But I don't feel the need for a refund.
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The problem here is that within 24 hours of release, Hello Games was putting out all kinds of statements about how they were going to fix all of the issues people were having and how the "servers" were "down" due to the massive amount of simultaneous players the game had on release. It's not unreasonable to assume on that basis that there WAS a multiplayer mode and that it merely wasn't working because of server capacity issues.
A reasonable player seeing the statements that Hello Games made could easily hav
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Which was yet another lie.
1) Players playing has gone down over 90% since then on average. At off peak it's a fraction of even that. It makes no difference.
2) There is no attempt at real-time network traffic whatsoever. Nothing sends out real-time packets. Nothing is designed to receive them.
3) There is no player model in the game's files. There's some comically bad development models, along with weirdness like a monkey in a hat and the Fallout logo. But no actual player model.
There is no multiplayer.
I'm having fun (Score:2)
I didn't read much about this game before it came out, but it seemed interesting since exploring landscapes is some of my favorite stuff to do in games. So far it seems a lot like Starflight by Electronic Arts which I loved as a kid, and I'm happy with that.
Sounds like a lot of people were promised something that was not well defined, and was partially defined by just the aspirations developers had, and then the potential buyers filled in the gaps with their own ideas of what could be. The first pre-release
Probably trying to avoid false advertising suits (Score:3)
The reason they're so eager to give refunds is likely to avoid false advertising lawsuits. Even on release, many of the collector's edition boxes had a sticker over the ESRB/CERO rating. Why? Because even after the game went gold, the ESRB and CERO both believed that the game had online multiplayer. The sticker had a replacement ESRB/CERO rating that was different because the ESRB and CERO now understood that there was no online content whatsoever.
At the same time, there are also "online features" in the game which don't appear to actually do anything. People were reporting earlier this week that the game doesn't save any of the names you give to planets or creatures - once you've named enough stuff, the older stuff starts getting deleted. I don't know if anyone's been over the game with a network mapper to see if it's sending out packets of any sort, but I'd guess not.
The companies are probably giving refunds so late because they don't want a class-action lawsuit on their hands. I'm sure a class-action attorney could find plenty of people who bought the game on the reasonable belief (given the interviews the lead developer did with various media outlets) that the game had multiplayer.
Sounds like I dodged a bullet... (Score:2)
When I read about the game, it sounded like a LOT of fun, so I checked into Steam to see if it was one of the ever-growing number of titles that run on Linux.. Alas, I was to find it was not.. Since I don't/won't run Windows on any of my computers, and use the Linux Steam client, I found that I was not going to be able to play *this* game.. After reading this article, It seems I dodged a bullet, both due to the lies AND the fact that Sony is behind this... Microsoft and Sony are on the "dead_to_me" list....
costco (Score:3)
I have heard costco has a legendary refund policy. That they will take back things after years of use.
Those are physical things that use real resources. No mans sky can be copied and deleted a billion times effortlessly, but only a 2 hour refund window? Why can't we have refunds whenever the hell we want on intangible property?
never preorder (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
if it took you 50 hours to figure out a feature wasn't there, then what's the problem. how many games start you off with the top of the line weapons, armor, vehicles, etc?
Re:Really slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't take 50 hours to figure that out in NMS. Granted, it will take longer than the average game to figure out how misrepresented it is, but 50 hours? Not even close. I would have refunded at 5 hours, except I knew it was against Steam's official policy so I didn't bother to try until reports started to come out that Steam might be bending the rules.
Honestly I don't care too much about the money - I never spend money on games that I can't afford to write off. It's the principle of it.
Re:Really slashdot? (Score:4, Informative)
There is a lot of grinding in this game. Mining, mining and more mining. 30-40 hours to realise there is no depth and it's all just the same seems reasonable. Lots of games need big time investments to pay off, and NMS needs time to see that the claimed features aren't there, especially if you started playing on day one.
You can never get that time wasted blasting rocks apart for nothing back.
Re: Really slashdot? (Score:4, Informative)
The game is set up to strongly, strongly hint that you unlock content as you move down one of two content paths.
You don't. Everything can be unlocked on the first planet.
The only way you're going to discover that is by talking to other players or after many hours of grinding.
I personally broke Steam's two hour limit simply trying to get the damned game to run, primarily due to the horrible way the options menu is set up. (Eventually I discovered you can just edit an XML file to fiddle with options. That and a day-one patch probably fixed my issues - but also sent me past the refund time limit.)
Re: (Score:2)
So be a grownup and read the reviews before you buy. Or be a grownup and accept the consequences of choosing to gamble by buying it before you know for sure what you're getting.
Re: (Score:3)
You might think 6 hours is a long time to get to that point, but I played a few minutes at a time, and loading time counts. At least an hour of the first 6 was loading screen, because I played in 5 or 10 minute increments. 5 to 10 minutes is about how long it would take the game to bore the ever-lov
Re:Really slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
HAVE ANY OF YOU ACTUALLY ASKED FOR A FUCKING STATEMENT FROM STEAM REGARDING THEIR REFUND POLICY ON NMS?
Let me address this:
Firstly Slashdot is a news aggregator. No one here will go out and ask anything. They will find links and post them for discussion. Let me do that for you now. [steampowered.com]
Steam will refund a game owned less than 14 days and played less than two hours. With lots of people reporting refunds after many hours of gameplay their policy or statement becomes completely irrelevant, as the story here is that they aren't following their policy. And neither is Sony.
Feel free to do your own real journalism on a real journalism site. After you're done maybe post the story to a couple of news aggregators like Slashdot.
But before you do fix your capslock key, shouting makes it looks like your have tantrum issues.
Re: (Score:3)
I am one of those who bought the game on pre-order at day 1 from GOG. The reasons for pre-order were many, but to name a few:
- Hype.
- The ability to explore planets never-before explored.
- The shop variety, both as looks as well as role.
- Hacking mini-games.
- Procedurally generated space stations.
- Ability to participate to large battles and take sides.
- The mystery at the center of the galaxy/universe.
Out of all the above, only the first two were in the game at release.
Now, I am at 26h 41m clocked time acc
Re: (Score:2)
Have you tried Space Engine [spaceengine.org]? It's pure exploration with no game elements, be that a plus or minus for you, and is free.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Informative)
With that kind of game supposedly based on exploration, you have to invest quite some time to find out that no, there's nothing to do here. 50h might be stretching out a bit, but even 20-30 hours of gameplay should not be enough to find everything if the game was not as empty as it is.
What's going on is you start the game, you fart around trying to get the stuff to get off planet. Then you fart around trying to get the stuff to go to other star systems. There is this impression that the good bit will start once you get past these initial challenges. However it doesn't. The next start system has more planets with the same active items (buildings you can go in).
There are no instructions. So you don't know if you are missing something important.
It can easily take 50 hours to work out that it isn't going to get better.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. NMS is built around a painful clicky grind. Seriously, you have to land, mine up resources, take off, click dozens of times to craft warp cells, click to load them, click through the slow, awkward starmap, wait through the animation, repeat four more times until you're out of warp cells and ready to repeat... all in order to go a bit over 1000 light years. Out of nearly 180000 that you have to do to reach the center. Where you're told that the game will utterly change, where planets get weirder
Re: (Score:2)
The sad thing is, even with the game in the state that it's in, if the development house had been at all decent, had at all play tested, they could have turned it into something that'd be at least decent to play. By means of:
1) Instead of all resources densely available on each planet, resources should be rare and sparse, so you have to actually look and survive.
2) Instead of all buildings densely spaced on each planet, each planet should have between "zero" and "a few" things present so that you don't exp
Re: (Score:2)
Add in persistent patchers that sit in the tray to grab updates for you, you can easily get THOUSANDS of hours for a game you have really only played 10 hours of.
Re: (Score:2)
If you buy a game through Steam the patcher/launcher IS Steam.
Re: (Score:2)
If you've got twenty hours of painful repetitive play into a game, you might spent a few hours trying to get back to your ship so you can continue from there rather than starting over. This is especially true if you are close to a promised reward.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are sleeping for 50 hours at a time, you should consult a doctor.
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's where the 50 hours come from:
Sean Murray, the CEO of Hello Games (tarnished be his name), said that at the "center" there's a huge mystery waiting to be unraveled. It would take players many, many hours of gameplay to get there. Many players actually attempted this, only to find that there is literally nothing in the center. The only thing that's there is some cheesy music and a cutscene of stars and then you're thrown out into another galaxy to start from scratch. This is arguably the biggest Fuck You sent a player's way I've ever seen in a game.
People have't played 50 hours while gaining enjoyment, they played 50 hours hoping to gain enjoyment. It's like going to work for a week + overtime only to be told your salary is actually the chance to come back again Monday and work some more.
Re: (Score:2)
Because lying marketers are a bigger problem to me than tantruming netizens, both because the latter are easier to filter out and because economy can't really work without the former because nobody can buy your product if they don't know it exists, no matter how useful it might be for them, thus logic dictates I side with the latter.
Also, having to keep your guard up at all times least some predatory asshole takes advantage of you
Re: (Score:2)
Also, having to keep your guard up at all times least some predatory asshole takes advantage of you is a miserable and wasteful way to live.
Then take a gamble sometimes. But be a grownup and accept that you chose to take a risk. Don't go crying when it doesn't work out.
Re: (Score:2)
Who cares what it was "pitched as"? Wait and read the reviews and stop being a tool.
Re: (Score:2)
He's not a Sony person. But yeah, name-calling is rarely helpful. Most people on Twitter would be better off without Twitter.
Re: (Score:2)
It's actually ok. Not great, but not shitty either -- at least on console.
It's a factor of overall scale. (Score:3)
I'm sorry to be the one to point it out, but you are wrong.
Someoen spends 50 hours on Peggle or Tetris and asks for a refund? I would agree that's a suspicious request.
But 50 hours is an arbitrary number. There are games for which 50 hours is a trivial drop in the bucket of the overall playtime value of the game. I'm sure you could fill a phone book with players of WoW that have a thousand plus hours in it. NMS was promising a universe so vast that it sets a far higher expectation of playtime where 50 h