• 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

    • 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.

      • 1 month

        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.

        • 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.

          • 1 month

            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.

            • 1 month

              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 :)

    • 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.

    • 1 month

      But what if it sucked? You can easily rage-complete a bad game within the refund window.

      • 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

      • 1 month

        Except most people said that they liked the game, left a good review and still refunded it, makes no sense

      • 1 month

        If the meal is bad, don’t finish it and then ask for a refund.

      • 1 month

        Whether or not you want to make the moral distinction is a personal choice, but there is an economic distinction to be made as well.

        Pirating a AAA game is fine because the studio is gonna make more games regardless.

        Pirating an indie game is stupid though, if too many people do that then the developer won’t be able to make enough money and won’t make more games.

  • 1 month

    The people who legitimately do this are the ones who make the rest of the gamers look bad.

    If you bought a game, especially for $3, played it from start to finish over the course of an hour and a half, and then bragged about it when you refunded it. You fully deserve to have your refund capability disabled.

    The thing is, though, I don’t really know a way that this can be implemented without allowing publishers to game the system. I do personally think that Two Hours is a little generous for the overall story because I will generally know whether or not I’m going to like a game within 35 minutes of playing.

    I think a good alternative to it is have your refund window be based off of the current sale price of the game.

    So for a game that’s less than five bucks, you would only have somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour of a refund window.

    Then for your typical indie window, which would be like fifteen to thirty dollars, you have an hour to hour and a half then your AAA title pricing of ~60, you have two or three hours.

    I can understand refunding a game if it’s broken on your system or just trash, but it feels real sleazy to me to spend money on a game, play it to completion, and then refund it anyway.

  • 1 month

    I have to imagine this was this risk the developer should have considered when making a game shorter than the return window.

    The platform shouldn’t have to intervene because the developer didn’t properly evaluate risk when releasing the game