It's Time For Video Game Refund Policies
It’s been along time since I could say that I’ve not run into a bug or two, three or twenty in a week of playing games, and this isn’t including alphas or betas that I participate in. Over the last decade, it is a problem that has been steadily getting worse with some groups who are in the repeat offender category more than others.
Clearly an increase in complexity is the primary source of these issues. If you go back to the origins of games and look at something like pong, there are really only a few things that can go wrong in a game that simple. Fast forward to a script and story heavy open world game non-linear game like Skyrim and it is easy to see that increased complexity has an exponential effect on game issues. To leave the issue there however, would be both a mistake and an excuse for large studio houses to continue with the status quo.
Normally when looking to resolve a problem, it is desirable to target the source. In this case the source is an also desirable outcome. Frankly, people like games that are more complex. That doesn’t only mean more complex in how they play, but more complex in how they are designed. More length variety and depth.
It is my assertion that game developers and publishers are currently and have been for some time, operating outside of their means. We hear time and time again that game development is too expensive, the party line that brings to our door day one DLC, pre-order content split to encourage multiple purchase, micro-transactions that are only micro to a 6 figure income.
Yet among that repeated mantra, never once is the solution to tone back design in order to reduce the cost. No, the costs must increase because big costs mean bigger profits which make shareholders happy. Never mind that numerous smaller projects could and do often have a higher profit margin, that being the profit in proportion to the cost, than one large project.
And amid all of this, the industry itself retains all of the control and power. Yes, I understand how the concepts of buyer beware and consumer choice enter into the picture but I can also posit that when a significant amount of your choice is held entirely in the franchise exclusive hug of the three big game publishers, you don’t really have as much choice as you think you do.
I believe that the main reason we continue to have poorly optimized, buggy, unfinished titles arriving on day one is simply the result of having no overt recourse against the publisher or developer. Our only choice is to play the long game of avoiding certain companies by name in a manner not inconsistent with a boycott, but since most gamers out in the wild blue yonder don’t actually know or care what company makes or publishes games, its’ a bit of a fool’s errand. Waiting for poor reputation to actually take hold such that the sales numbers decrease isn’t exactly a great solution.
In other markets, customer recourse is available in two primary ways. Regulatory control and retailer cooperation. Regulatory control would be similar in a lot of ways to the fit for purpose rules of the UK, but as yet, there isn’t a regulatory body anywhere in the world that I’m aware of which monitors electronic entertainment for usability. In essence, for countries like the UK where those rules but lack of enforcement agency exists, you have to be willing to go to court in order to be assured resolution which is never a good end game plan. The only avenues that do exist are regulatory groups which share industries such as advertising watch dogs who monitor accuracy of advertisements.
Retailer cooperation on the other hand is much more attainable, however to date we haven’t had much luck in that area. You will be familiar with what I’m talking about, the idea of a return policy. A return policy is a combination of factors but ultimately comes down to the retailer telling the consumer that their reputation is worth trusting and should anything go wrong with the product shortly after purchase, they will ensure the consumer is protected. There are some back end issues in large retail contracts where the retailer simply returns defective or unwanted but opened items to the manufacturer and are refunded. And of course if you want to be on the store shelf in Walmart or other big name stores, you don’t really have a choice but to accept that kind of return term. And of course return policies to vary from store to store.
Yet in digital media, we don’t have this. The obvious reason why is because of the nature of the goods. Physical retailers have no assurance that and opened but unused product has not been installed or ripped. So PC games, music, movies, digital code content and to a lesser extent console games simply can’t be returned once you’ve opened them.
Of course, in most cases as long as you haven’t opened the product, you can do a return. This mirrors a part of the Origin return policy that allows you to return a game that you bought but never played within a week of the release date. A week is a shadow of the 30-90 day return windows that retailers would give for the same unopened product. Especially with the gold standard assurance Origin has knowing that you’ve never played the title.
EA does have a nice nod to the consumer in that you can play the game and if it is garbage immediately, you can still get a refund, but I don’t think that part is fleshed out well enough. It seems unlikely to me that a majority of gamers will put in a significant amount of time early on such that a real determination of the quality of a title can be seen and as such only the absolute most broken drivel will get weeded out this way.
Conversely, Ubisoft and Valve have essentially no return policy at all. If you complain loudly enough they might give you a single return, once. This isn’t good for consumers.
I’m not a fan of a digital only world. I think that it is extremely dangerous to give all of the control of our leisure time over to companies who have an overwhelming tendency to forget about the consumer and the game as soon as the release date arrives. The more master server online required titles that we have, the more instances of losing games that we purchased will occur. It is simply inevitable. Even the great companies out there can’t guarantee that they will be around in 5 or 10 or even 20 years and yet we are beholden to them existing in order to use a product that in many cases shouldn’t have actually required an online restriction.
However, it seems to me that since that is the direction we are going, and at a breakneck pace I might add, we may as well push to get a couple of advantages along the way. And I think it is high time to start with return policies.
We live in a world where game developers can not only know for sure whether you’ve played a purchased game or not, but also know how long you played it, at what time of the day and often such lovely unnecessary details as where you are in the world. Sometimes they even know if you’re playing a stolen game. Since our digital stores have the assurance retailers lack that you’ve never used a product, I think it is reasonable to have at least a 30 day return policy on unopened games. The excuse for why we can’t have this simply doesn’t exist anymore, and it is a policy that companies like EA, Valve and Ubisoft both can and should support for the same reason that retailers do it, reputation.
It also seems to me that new games can be considered defective, broken, unfinished and unusable. There are numerous ways that this metric could be calculated including community rankings and product review by the digital stores, but believe it or not, they could also do it by using crash dumps. Remember, these games track everything that goes on. They record the background data when they crash just as they record playtime. Regardless of how it is done, I would like to see a proper mechanism in these digital stores to account for products being garbage, especially since stores like Steam seem perfectly happy to list products like Air Control.
The beauty of a proper digital store refund policy that is actually built with consumer protection in mind is that it will have the same effect that it does in retail stores. Either the manufacturers will lower their prices and accept a high rate of returns as a cost of doing business, or they’ll up their game and stop producing crap because the returns hit the bottom line. In either situation, consumers will be better for it.
