Microsoft Follows Valve Down The Road Of Refunds On Digital Game Purchases
from the follow-the-leader dept
With Steam's policy for providing refunds on digital game purchases being roughly two years old, many people forget the context of the time when Valve began offering those refunds. It's worth being reminded that at that time nobody in the neighborhood of the Steam client's popularity was offering any real avenue for getting refunds on digital game purchases. Those that did mostly did so under the most restrictive conditions, with insane single-digit day windows in which a refund could be had, and only for certain reasons, of which the game being shitty was not included. Steam's criteria was that you could request a refund during a two-week period for any reason, be it the game not living up to expectations, the gamer's machine not being able to run it properly, or anything else. The other contextual aspect to keep in mind was that Steam had endured several weeks of absolutely brutal PR, with awful customer service ratings and the whole fiasco over its attempt at creating a paid-mod system.
Still, Valve broke the mold in some respects with the new policy, forcing the competition to keep up. It took two years, but Microsoft recently announced that both its Xbox and Windows 10 marketplaces will likewise offer refunds on digital purchases, with the same fourteen-day window and the same requirement that the game not have been played for more than two hours.
Microsoft's self-service refunds work much like returns do on PC game-download service Steam. Shoppers have up to 14 days after purchasing a game or app to request a refund, and that will only work if the software in question has not been used for more than two hours while owned. Similar to Steam, Xbox and Windows 10 users will have to navigate to an "order history" section of their account to request such a refund, rather than any obvious tabs or buttons within a given game or app's landing page. However, this can only be done through a Web browser pointed to account.microsoft.com, as opposed to the Xbox One or Windows Store dashboards.
It's Microsoft, so of course it would have to be more complicated than it should be, but this is still a good and important step. For far too long, digital purchases for all kinds of goods -- video games included -- were viewed as somehow different from a consumer rights standpoint than a physical product. This sense of difference propagates itself in many directions, but the ability to get refunds on products was certainly one of them. It's far past time that the fake wall that's been erected between digital goods in terms of consumer rights had some bricks pulled from it, and these refund policies are a good start.
They also serve to show how the competition will respond when one company begins treating its customers well, which is essentially to play follow the leader. You can bet that all eyes are now on the PlayStation Network to see exactly how long it will take for Sony to keep up with the competition.
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Filed Under: digital games, refunds
Companies: microsoft, valve
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Not trying to diss Valve or MS, but I thought this was from lawsuits
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Re: Not trying to diss Valve or MS, but I thought this was from lawsuits
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8620-QYAL-4516
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Not a word about EA
But I am sure some folks will find a way to bash EA for being leading the way.
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Re: Not a word about EA
It's not really a meaningful comparison to full-fledged storefronts offering entire catalog (mostly) refunds.
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Re: Not a word about EA
As stated on the Origin help page for the GGG, it only applies to EA games and a small handful of third party games. It isn't store-wide.
Both Steam's and Microsoft's refund policies apply to nearly every game purchased on their storefronts (I recall there being certain exceptions, probably to do with MMOs and third-party billing systems...).
Further, in many ways it's a more restrictive "guarantee" than Steam's refund policy in every respect other than giving the user 24 hours after first launching the game to log a refund which, under specific circumstances, could give users a longer window than the 2 hours' playtime of the Steam automated refund process.
So, yeah, it's not a terrible policy, but it's worse than Steam's.
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Re: Not a word about EA
Nah, you don't suddenly get to be praised for being a pile of shit for years, then started smelling a little less horrible for a day.
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Good
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When TOS Declined, No Refund Option
Anyway, the credit card company was reasonable and gave me a courtesy refund.
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emulate it or buy it
In other news: If you buy a digital game, but you don't have a physical copy of said game (and the games DownLoadableContent), do you own said game? Years after purchasing the game, after it's servers have been shut down due to the developer being bought out by another company, will you still be able to play the game (including it's DLC) if you don't have a physical copy?
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"It's Microsoft, so of course it would have to be more complicated than it should be, but this is still a good and important step."
We could have had this three years ago, when Microsoft announced it at their E3 event.
Granted, the event wasn't going to win Best In Show, but Microsoft stated:
All ruined because gamers screamed "DRM" and ran to Sony due to the misconception of "always online".
This news is about as "good and important" as is "better late than never".
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Re:
I'll bite. What was the misconception, and how was that pile of crap not DRM?
"This news is about as "good and important" as is "better late than never"."
No, it's about "ooh look, MS could deliver on most of their promises without the crap they insisted was necessary (or on stuff they initially insisted was impossible such as backward compatibility)".
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