If you refund an indy game that you completed, you’re a sociopath and there’s no helping you. There isn’t a structural system that’s going to prevent that, some people are complete human garbage
To whoever replied to my original comment (I don’t understand how OC can call me a sociopath, block me, and make my comment disappear, but whatever) and likened playing a game and refunding it to refunding a meal you ate: you can’t re-eat a meal but you can replay a game.
Most shmups you can beat in less than 30 minutes with continues, but the fun is replayability. If it’s not replayable, it’s not worth the money, unless it’s appropriately priced.
I’m honestly tired of people who inhale 1-hour walking simulators on daily basis or have hundreds of games sitting in their library unplayed talking about game prices or value per dollar. Y’all suck at this. You better leave this discussion alone.
It should be easy enough to implement a refundability window based on either time-in-game or percentage completion (based on main story line, not side quests and diversions).
I mean if the game says 20 hours of gameplay but you complete it in an hour, that’s false advertising and there should be an exception. But if a game says it takes an hour to complete and you complete it in an hour, there’s no reason why you should be able to get that refunded.
It’s not just the playing it, enjoying it, and then refunding it. It’s the bragging about it on the fucking platform. Kind of asshole who does that. Well, that’s gaming culture these days.
Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I’m bored, to watch Yahtzee’s reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I’ve not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.
I thought “sounds curious, maybe I’ll search for some full reviews of that to see what it’s like”…
Ho. Lee. Hell.
There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.
On the bright side, my “never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos” commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I’m old enough that this shit wasn’t ubiquitous when I was impressionable.
There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.
This has always been a problem in the gaming community, but it’s been especially rampant for the last decade or so since Steve Bannon identified gamers as a demographic (largely comprised of insecure teenage boys) that is particularly susceptible to fascist messaging and threw money into signal-boosting the worst of it, and a bunch of impressionable dumbfucks went along with it.
If you aren’t familiar, they are game breakers. Spiffing brit tends toward grand strategy games, and finds balance issues in them for a living best I can tell, and lets game it out griefs NPCs and systems to see how much abuse a game can take and what sort of tomfoolery he can manage. He tends toward very complex base building and mining type games.
Even if neither of those genres are your thing to play (they aren’t really mine), the channels are funny as hell and totally enjoyable.
Genuinely, thank you both for the suggestions. I’m just wary of falling down the YouTube rabbithole - I refuse to even log-in to the damned site - so if I start watching one of them it’s going to have to be one I can remember the name of to search ;-).
(I thought Facebook was a bad idea from the get-go and never signed up, quit Instagram when FB bought them, quit Twitter when that asshole bought them… Lemmy and (sorry to say) Reddit are literally my only social media, and I question both of them fairly regularly. I do not claim to be normal ;-).)
The only reason I make an exception for Yahtzee is that having had a Steam account since Half-Life 2, Steam nevertheless remains comically bad at recommending games I’d be remotely interested in. Yahtzee’s reviews I often don’t agree with, but they do at least give me a hint of things I should check out.
Consider looking into something like freetube (pc, there might also be apps for android that do the same, I don’t know) Its logged in as an anonymous account so you can subscribe to stuff, but you can go into the settings and disable all the distractions, which is what they call everything thats not videos :) All I ever see is stuff from my subscribed channels, and if I go into the individual channels, the only thing that remains is the main videos feed, everything else (about, shorts, community, etc.) is disabled. I also have sponsor block enabled to auto-skip all promotional content including self-promo.
The algorithm is basically non-existent on freetube, in that your recommendations feed on the side of the video player is going to be mostly the same channel you are watching now, not just random shit. Maybe a few things thrown in that are closely related -like if they work with another channel a lot that other channel might come up- maybe some weird bug videos that aren’t related at all, but those are all semi-sciency so that could be from my own watching, idk, I think the dev included some basic channels for the main feed so it wasn’t empty, they don’t really change and I’ve had other people mention seeing the exact same videos in their feed, years apart. I haven’t seen much, if any, questionable or undesirable content without explicitly searching for it, though.
I find the distraction-free mode of using it to be very much like back in the day when you had to know what you wanted because there was no algorithm. Its not addictive or changing my opinions, imo, because I genuinely struggle to find new channels, what with no algorithm shoving shit down my throat, so I get what I’m looking for and nothing else. I check it a couple times a month, quickly run out of new content, get bored, and go do something else. Perhaps thats a workable option for you, as well :)
Thank you! I see it has a Linux version, so I will genuinely check that out - as soon as I get home. (As I write I’m waiting to board the first of 13 hours or so of flights - that’s why I happened to be checking out gaming reviews yesterday ;-). I’m hoping the 7th Guest remake will keep me sane…)
It does! Both linux and windows versions work very well, though I discovered on ubuntu that you can install both an app store and a .deb version and they will be entirely separate instances. Wild! And confusing for noobs when updating!
Fly safe friend! That sounds miserable! Hopefully it is travel for a fun reason, at least.
That sounds like something for people who like being angry, in which case I’d argue the sense of defeating the game is the enjoyment you got out of it.
I rarely do that, but when I do, it’s not a case of too boring (those I just forget about entirely). It’s the kind of game that feels so wrong I just have to see how bad it gets.
Okamiden on the DS is my go-to example. Absolute fan of the original, but I finished that pseudosequel in one long, angry session.
Another would be Pokémon Pearl. Terribly balanced with the most tedious world to traverse I’ve experienced in a Pokémon game. It was part of a gen 4 to gen 7 playthrough with dex transfer so I committed to it. Black, Z, Alpha Sapphire, Moon? Yeah, had fun with all of them. Pearl was complete ass.
There’s nuance here. If it’s ‘bad’ as in like the meat is still raw, or there’s a lump of the chef’s hair wadded up in it, then yeah it’s refund time.
If it’s ‘bad’ as in they made it properly but you didn’t like it, just suck it up and don’t order it next time. It’s good to try new things, but you can’t expect all of them to be a banger. The number of people I’ve seen punish the restaurant for giving them exactly what they asked for is kinda bonkers.
It’s only a 2 hour window. I think very reasonable that you might play a game for 90 minutes and then at the end say “wait, that’s it‽ That’s not worth $x!”
Imagine eating a meal for two hours and then when the bill comes say “that’s it?”
I get that you might expect more. I felt that way about Cyberpunk. I’d barely got going, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I still liked it.
And I dunno the fact that it’s indies doesn’t count for nothing in my books. I’d say go case by case, but generally I agree with the indie dev that it’s scummy and I don’t support it.
If you try a new flavor of chips and hate them do you take them back to the store for a refund? If they were stale, sure. If the game was buggy as hell and didn’t run right I’d say submit for a refund.
A lot of products used to say “satisfaction guaranteed”. So you could literally return products you had consumed. I don’t know how many people did that though.
Most of those guarantees involve mailing your receipt and the proof of purchase to the company along with a letter explaining how you were not satisfied before they will get around to mailing you a check for the $4.73 in 8-12 weeks.
Some of them went over the top the try to ‘make it right’. Dude I went to highschool with did this shit almost like it was a hobby. He’d call the customer support line and complain about whatever bullshit he could come up with - gummy lump in his drink, hard flake in his bag of chips that 'might have been a fingernail!… they’d take his number and address, and that was usually the end of it.
Then occasionally a box would randomly show up at his front door with like 50 bottles of soda or candy bars or w/e, and a letter apologizing for the trouble lol.
Manipulative little shit. And that was when we were like 14 years old… dude’s probably running his own organized crime ring nowadays. xD
I swear to Glob, another one that compares this situation to eating food. We’ve had that in another thread already. You could compare it to watching a movie maybe, but how are you people always going for the food comparison?
One time I returned a single coconut because the inside was completely moldy and the lady behind me accused me of drinking the water and returning the flesh… I was like lady I have a job i don’t even care about the 2 bucks. I just figured how else are they going to know that they got a bunch of bad coconuts if I don’t come leave a record. Im not trying to run a scam for moldy fruit water.
She actually said that makes sense and dropped it but I was shocked… like you really think someone laundering coconut water one fuzzy nut at a time?
I’ll confess I did this once – with Duke Nukem Forever. My old best bud and I played the fuck out of Duke3D back in the day (including building our own levels) and 3DRealms cockteased everyone for well over a decade with their supposed ‘ultimate’ title. So when it finally released I HAD to play it. And of course there was no way it could live up to the hype. It was an inconsistent mess and I powered through it in under 2 hours. I guess I’m glad I played it but it wasn’t even remotely revolutionary… At beast or was like a collection of fan mods bundled into an ‘official’ title. Not at all worth the asking price. I have no desire to revisit any of it so overall I don’t feel like I ripped them off; if anything I feel like they disappointed me majorly as a fan.
I played it so others don’t have to. Yeah, that’s how I’ll spin it 😂
If you refund an indy game that you completed, you’re a sociopath and there’s no helping you. There isn’t a structural system that’s going to prevent that, some people are complete human garbage
Y’all standards are in the gutter. Completing a game does not mean you’re obligated to keep it.
If you did not have fun, or if the game does not meet your expectations for replayability, the responsible financial decision is to refund it.
Whether it’s indie or not is irrelevant. The world economy is shit, and, consumers or indie developers, everyone is struggling alike.
I understand you’re going after people with money to spare who maliciously do this, but that sentence is not it.
To whoever replied to my original comment (I don’t understand how OC can call me a sociopath, block me, and make my comment disappear, but whatever) and likened playing a game and refunding it to refunding a meal you ate: you can’t re-eat a meal but you can replay a game.
Most shmups you can beat in less than 30 minutes with continues, but the fun is replayability. If it’s not replayable, it’s not worth the money, unless it’s appropriately priced.
I’m honestly tired of people who inhale 1-hour walking simulators on daily basis or have hundreds of games sitting in their library unplayed talking about game prices or value per dollar. Y’all suck at this. You better leave this discussion alone.
It should be easy enough to implement a refundability window based on either time-in-game or percentage completion (based on main story line, not side quests and diversions).
I mean if the game says 20 hours of gameplay but you complete it in an hour, that’s false advertising and there should be an exception. But if a game says it takes an hour to complete and you complete it in an hour, there’s no reason why you should be able to get that refunded.
Ok, sure. I think we’re missing the forest for the trees here though
What’s the forest in this case, and what are the trees?
Are the trees the individual cases of refund abuse, and the forest is the culture of unmitigated refund abuse?
Cause if so, I don’t see how my comment was missing the forest for the trees…
In fact, yours was the one focused on individual cases and claiming there’s no larger unifying structure that can be addressed…
It’s not just the playing it, enjoying it, and then refunding it. It’s the bragging about it on the fucking platform. Kind of asshole who does that. Well, that’s gaming culture these days.
Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I’m bored, to watch Yahtzee’s reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I’ve not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.
I thought “sounds curious, maybe I’ll search for some full reviews of that to see what it’s like”…
Ho. Lee. Hell.
There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.
On the bright side, my “never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos” commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I’m old enough that this shit wasn’t ubiquitous when I was impressionable.
This has always been a problem in the gaming community, but it’s been especially rampant for the last decade or so since Steve Bannon identified gamers as a demographic (largely comprised of insecure teenage boys) that is particularly susceptible to fascist messaging and threw money into signal-boosting the worst of it, and a bunch of impressionable dumbfucks went along with it.
I understand your desire to not use youtube, but you are missing out on The Spiffing Brit and Let’s Game it Out
If you aren’t familiar, they are game breakers. Spiffing brit tends toward grand strategy games, and finds balance issues in them for a living best I can tell, and lets game it out griefs NPCs and systems to see how much abuse a game can take and what sort of tomfoolery he can manage. He tends toward very complex base building and mining type games.
Even if neither of those genres are your thing to play (they aren’t really mine), the channels are funny as hell and totally enjoyable.
I’ll add that noclip (and their second channel noclip_2 are excellent for games journalism /documentaries.
And CallMeKevin has been doing wholesome video game content (and other things) for about 10 years.
Genuinely, thank you both for the suggestions. I’m just wary of falling down the YouTube rabbithole - I refuse to even log-in to the damned site - so if I start watching one of them it’s going to have to be one I can remember the name of to search ;-).
(I thought Facebook was a bad idea from the get-go and never signed up, quit Instagram when FB bought them, quit Twitter when that asshole bought them… Lemmy and (sorry to say) Reddit are literally my only social media, and I question both of them fairly regularly. I do not claim to be normal ;-).)
The only reason I make an exception for Yahtzee is that having had a Steam account since Half-Life 2, Steam nevertheless remains comically bad at recommending games I’d be remotely interested in. Yahtzee’s reviews I often don’t agree with, but they do at least give me a hint of things I should check out.
Thats a super fair stance.
Consider looking into something like freetube (pc, there might also be apps for android that do the same, I don’t know) Its logged in as an anonymous account so you can subscribe to stuff, but you can go into the settings and disable all the distractions, which is what they call everything thats not videos :) All I ever see is stuff from my subscribed channels, and if I go into the individual channels, the only thing that remains is the main videos feed, everything else (about, shorts, community, etc.) is disabled. I also have sponsor block enabled to auto-skip all promotional content including self-promo.
The algorithm is basically non-existent on freetube, in that your recommendations feed on the side of the video player is going to be mostly the same channel you are watching now, not just random shit. Maybe a few things thrown in that are closely related -like if they work with another channel a lot that other channel might come up- maybe some weird bug videos that aren’t related at all, but those are all semi-sciency so that could be from my own watching, idk, I think the dev included some basic channels for the main feed so it wasn’t empty, they don’t really change and I’ve had other people mention seeing the exact same videos in their feed, years apart. I haven’t seen much, if any, questionable or undesirable content without explicitly searching for it, though.
I find the distraction-free mode of using it to be very much like back in the day when you had to know what you wanted because there was no algorithm. Its not addictive or changing my opinions, imo, because I genuinely struggle to find new channels, what with no algorithm shoving shit down my throat, so I get what I’m looking for and nothing else. I check it a couple times a month, quickly run out of new content, get bored, and go do something else. Perhaps thats a workable option for you, as well :)
Thank you! I see it has a Linux version, so I will genuinely check that out - as soon as I get home. (As I write I’m waiting to board the first of 13 hours or so of flights - that’s why I happened to be checking out gaming reviews yesterday ;-). I’m hoping the 7th Guest remake will keep me sane…)
It does! Both linux and windows versions work very well, though I discovered on ubuntu that you can install both an app store and a .deb version and they will be entirely separate instances. Wild! And confusing for noobs when updating!
Fly safe friend! That sounds miserable! Hopefully it is travel for a fun reason, at least.
Y’all standards are in the gutter. Completing a game does not mean you’re obligated to keep it.
If you did not have fun, or if the game does not meet your expectations for replayability, the responsible financial decision is to refund it.
Whether it’s indie or not is irrelevant. The world economy is shit, and, consumers or indie developers, everyone is struggling alike.
I understand you’re going after people with money to spare who maliciously do this, but that sentence is not it.
“I finished my plate but I actually hated it so I demand a refund” is what you sound like.
You complaining about the economy while you NOT pay artists for their work is why you’re a spciopath
Atp just pirate it and don’t brag about refunding the game in the reviews of the game you just completed, liked and deemed enjoyable
But what if it sucked? You can easily rage-complete a bad game within the refund window.
Except most people said that they liked the game, left a good review and still refunded it, makes no sense
That sounds like something for people who like being angry, in which case I’d argue the sense of defeating the game is the enjoyment you got out of it.
But Jesus, just pirate. Get off steam
Who keeps playing a game they don’t like? Why would you do that to yourself?
I rarely do that, but when I do, it’s not a case of too boring (those I just forget about entirely). It’s the kind of game that feels so wrong I just have to see how bad it gets.
Okamiden on the DS is my go-to example. Absolute fan of the original, but I finished that pseudosequel in one long, angry session.
Another would be Pokémon Pearl. Terribly balanced with the most tedious world to traverse I’ve experienced in a Pokémon game. It was part of a gen 4 to gen 7 playthrough with dex transfer so I committed to it. Black, Z, Alpha Sapphire, Moon? Yeah, had fun with all of them. Pearl was complete ass.
If the meal is bad, don’t finish it and then ask for a refund.
There’s nuance here. If it’s ‘bad’ as in like the meat is still raw, or there’s a lump of the chef’s hair wadded up in it, then yeah it’s refund time.
If it’s ‘bad’ as in they made it properly but you didn’t like it, just suck it up and don’t order it next time. It’s good to try new things, but you can’t expect all of them to be a banger. The number of people I’ve seen punish the restaurant for giving them exactly what they asked for is kinda bonkers.
It’s only a 2 hour window. I think very reasonable that you might play a game for 90 minutes and then at the end say “wait, that’s it‽ That’s not worth $x!”
Imagine eating a meal for two hours and then when the bill comes say “that’s it?”
I get that you might expect more. I felt that way about Cyberpunk. I’d barely got going, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I still liked it.
And I dunno the fact that it’s indies doesn’t count for nothing in my books. I’d say go case by case, but generally I agree with the indie dev that it’s scummy and I don’t support it.
This is the sociopathy.
Sociopathy is not typically linked with emotion, no.
This is the sociopathy.
If you try a new flavor of chips and hate them do you take them back to the store for a refund? If they were stale, sure. If the game was buggy as hell and didn’t run right I’d say submit for a refund.
Depends how bad. But I wouldn’t complete it if it was bad enough to return
A lot of products used to say “satisfaction guaranteed”. So you could literally return products you had consumed. I don’t know how many people did that though.
Most of those guarantees involve mailing your receipt and the proof of purchase to the company along with a letter explaining how you were not satisfied before they will get around to mailing you a check for the $4.73 in 8-12 weeks.
Yes, so Steam is better and more consumer friendly than them.
Some of them went over the top the try to ‘make it right’. Dude I went to highschool with did this shit almost like it was a hobby. He’d call the customer support line and complain about whatever bullshit he could come up with - gummy lump in his drink, hard flake in his bag of chips that 'might have been a fingernail!… they’d take his number and address, and that was usually the end of it.
Then occasionally a box would randomly show up at his front door with like 50 bottles of soda or candy bars or w/e, and a letter apologizing for the trouble lol.
Manipulative little shit. And that was when we were like 14 years old… dude’s probably running his own organized crime ring nowadays. xD
I swear to Glob, another one that compares this situation to eating food. We’ve had that in another thread already. You could compare it to watching a movie maybe, but how are you people always going for the food comparison?
It’s more active than just watching something, like you’ve constantly got to drive the experience forward and so decide whether to continue.
But yeah I’ve also walked out of movies and got a refund. I wouldn’t do it after the movie though
Lol “you people.” This whole comment section needs a cold shower.
Most stores around here don’t accept food refunds unless they’re unopened or completely covered in mold.
One time I returned a single coconut because the inside was completely moldy and the lady behind me accused me of drinking the water and returning the flesh… I was like lady I have a job i don’t even care about the 2 bucks. I just figured how else are they going to know that they got a bunch of bad coconuts if I don’t come leave a record. Im not trying to run a scam for moldy fruit water.
She actually said that makes sense and dropped it but I was shocked… like you really think someone laundering coconut water one fuzzy nut at a time?
The perfect crime…
I think you’re getting lost in the weeds here, friend
If it aucked and you experienced that whole piece of art you don’t get your money back. You don’t get your money back for a bad movie my guy.
Art gallery’s don’t give refunds and they ALL suck.
OPERA IS A REAL THING
I’ll confess I did this once – with Duke Nukem Forever. My old best bud and I played the fuck out of Duke3D back in the day (including building our own levels) and 3DRealms cockteased everyone for well over a decade with their supposed ‘ultimate’ title. So when it finally released I HAD to play it. And of course there was no way it could live up to the hype. It was an inconsistent mess and I powered through it in under 2 hours. I guess I’m glad I played it but it wasn’t even remotely revolutionary… At beast or was like a collection of fan mods bundled into an ‘official’ title. Not at all worth the asking price. I have no desire to revisit any of it so overall I don’t feel like I ripped them off; if anything I feel like they disappointed me majorly as a fan.
I played it so others don’t have to. Yeah, that’s how I’ll spin it 😂