
GOG asks you to please not abuse its expansive new 30-day refund policy - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/gog-asks-you-to-please-not-abuse-its-expansive-new-30-day-refund-policy/
======
warpech
This is an inspiring, bold move. Of course there will be abusers, but it seems
GOG is betting that:

\- the abusers are people who wouldn't buy anyway

\- the positive PR will help GOG to increase the sales, as this is a niche
platform compared to Steam. Increased sales will compensate the losses

\- some people will buy more, knowing that they can try and return. It is
likely that they will keep their game, that they wouldn't try otherwise

\- the owner of GOG sells their own games on the platform: The Witcher series,
Cyberpunk 2077. These games have higher margins than the games licensed from
3rd parties

\- I think they want to increase the awareness of the platform before
Cyperpunk 2077 ships later this year

~~~
gknoy
TIL that CDPR owns GoG. Thanks for pointing that out! I have until now made it
a habit to almost exclusively buy on Steam (convenience), but this might make
me support them more directly.

~~~
simion314
>Steam (convenience),

There are some downsides with Steam, most annoying is I can't have Steam open
on my machine and play or install something while my son is laying some game
on a different PC(same home/IP)

~~~
anon73044
If one of those games is offline, you could disconnect that machine front the
internet and start Steam in offline mode.

~~~
simion314
This is what I do with Skyrim, but sometimes I needed to install or update
something. It sucks you can't create a family account and transfer/gift games
to that account(they can limit to 2 family accounts), the family support they
have is very limited , last time I checked a family member can't play one of
your games while you want to play something else.

------
gambler
I this this is a good move. I stopped buying games on sales long time ago. I
only buy something when I want to play it _right now_ , regardless of how much
it costs.

So, you can't entice me with sales. However, a return policy makes me _much_
more like to try something on a whim, because I know I will not get stuck with
expensive crap.

There are only 2 games in my GOG library that I would have returned.

~~~
pingpongchef
> I this this is a good move. I stopped buying games on sales long time ago. I
> only buy something when I want to play it right now, regardless of how much
> it costs.

Amazing. I came to the _exact same_ conclusion/rule after feeling the familiar
pang of guilt looking at my Steam library filled with games I've never played,
for the jillionth time. I'm certain I'm saving a great deal of money but I'm
concerned with what Valve's next move will be if the returns from sales
diminish too much.

------
giancarlostoro
Alternatively they could add a simple $1 service fee to games that is part of
the pricing (so they give a discount on MSRP or something or just add the fee
period) that becomes non-refundable. I could care less about losing out on a
dollar. It would certainly add up over time, course if you have a user
returning > 95% of the games they buy, it might be really obvious who is
abusing the system.

HumbleBundle does take a % from bundles.

~~~
hombre_fatal
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind a discount for waiving my ability to
refund, which applies to 90% of the things I purchase.

~~~
AstralStorm
You cannot lawfully do that for remote purchases in the EU.

------
thaumasiotes
> For technical reasons, we cannot divide a game pack (for instance, a season
> pass, a pack containing the base game and its DLCs, or a pack containing a
> whole series of games). As a result, you would get a refund for the full
> pack and, as a consequence, the full pack will be removed from your account.
> If you apply for a refund for a DLC, and it was not purchased as a pack
> (bundled with the base game), we can issue a refund for the DLC itself. If
> you refund the base game, but also purchased DLCs separately, we would also
> refund the DLCs linked to that base game.

(from the FAQ page for the new policy, [https://support.gog.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360006129837?produ...](https://support.gog.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360006129837?product=gog) )

I'm intrigued by the internals here. GOG does indeed sell some things both
bundled and individually, like the "Hollow Knight + Soundtracks" bundle
compared to "Hollow Knight (no soundtracks)" / "Hollow Knight Official
Soundtrack" / "Hollow Knight Gods & Nightmares DLC Soundtrack".

It is not obvious to me why an account that purchased the bundle should be
treated differently from an account that purchased the three individual
offerings. (Well, in this case, the bundle is cheaper, but that's not always
true.)

Amazon has this problem too. If you buy an mp3 from them, they'll discount the
cost of the digital album that mp3 was technically offered from. If that album
exists as multiple SKUs, only one SKU will see the discount. Be careful! And
Kindle MatchBook will likewise only match if the editions of the ebook
currently offered and the physical book you purchased coincide. Was a new
edition released with a new foreword? You need to buy another paper copy if
you want to be re-eligible for MatchBook. Even if there's only one ebook
offering, for the current edition -- even if the old version of the ebook is
automatically updated to the new version -- your old purchase stops qualifying
you for MatchBook when the new edition comes out.

~~~
ergothus
> It is not obvious to me why an account that purchased the bundle should be
> treated differently from an account that purchased the three individual
> offerings

Let's say 3 SKUs exist: one for $10 and 2 for $15

Now add a bundle that offers all three for $30.

If someone with the bundle wants a refund on the item that is normally $10,
what do you do that ISN'T different from someone that bought them each
individually?

Or am I misunderstanding your confusion?

~~~
thaumasiotes
GOG already offers this exact functionality, two different ways:

1\. Add a fourth SKU. There are no files associated with this new SKU, but if
you own it, you can download the files associated with the first three SKUs.

2\. When you pay for the products, if all three SKUs are in your shopping
cart[1], you get a 25% discount. Otherwise you pay full price.

If I'm reading you right, you're saying that if you bought bundle #2, then
refunding the $10 item should obviously get you $7.50 -- because that's what
you paid for it when you bought it -- but there's just no way of determining
how to refund the same $10 item from bundle #1, even though bundle #1 and
bundle #2 do not differ in any way at all.

(In fact, GOG bundles usually price the last item negatively -- it is cheaper
to buy the whole bundle than it would be to buy all-but-one of the bundled
items. These are still all formally individual purchases covered by the return
policy, and I feel pretty confident they're not going to refund you a negative
amount if you return an item you bought in one of these individual-purchases-
with-discount bundles.)

[1] Technical note that doesn't affect the discussion: if you already own an
item, it counts as being in your shopping cart for purposes of bundle
discounts.

~~~
ergothus
> If I'm reading you right

No - I was saying the same thing you are: the items of the bundle CANNOT be
mapped individually, which is why GOG has this policy. The poster I was
replying to was saying they didn't understand why a bundle was treated
differently, and I was trying to say why. (apparently, poorly)

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I was saying the same thing you are: the items of the bundle CANNOT be
> mapped individually

I wasn't saying this, because it isn't true. Bundled items are _usually_
processed as a set of simultaneous individual purchases, with a discount
applied to each of them.

What do you think of bundle #1 and bundle #2? How would you expect refunds to
be processed in either case?

------
seattle_spring
I have a feeling a few bad actors will force them to rescind this policy.
Something similar happened with REI: They used to offer a lifetime no
questions asked guarantee. I knew people that would return hiking boots they
used for 5 years, and claim they were faulty because a shoelace broke or the
tread wore too far.

~~~
rhn_mk1
A physical goods company pays a significant cost for every item sold, so each
return always turns into a loss. While I don't exactly know the arrangements
GOG, I suspect that they have insignificant costs for creating copies of many
of their games (certainly the ones they made), so a refund eats only bandwidth
costs.

Additional publicity will cover those bandwidth costs as long as there are
some customers who buy and don't return.

~~~
zaksoup
The costs associated with this policy seem much more likely to be based on
decreased sales if folks buy a game, play it as much as they want (within 30
days), and return for a full refund.

Less that they spend bandwidth/compute costs they can't recoup with the
return.

~~~
thecrash
All GOG games are easily available on the pirate bay and other free sites.
Anyone who just wants to get a game without paying already has an easier path
than buying and requesting a refund.

This is in line with GOG's anti-DRM policy: No matter how restrictive your
systems, people who don't want to pay won't. So why have systems which punish
and inconvenience the people who do want to pay?

------
jedberg
Sort of off topic: A lot of their older games rely on DosBox to run on Mac.
Their version of DosBox is 32 bit and doesn't run on the latest MacOs.

There is a 64-bit version of DosBox. Does anyone know either how to switch out
their version of DosBox for the 64 bit, or know when they might do it?

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
macOS is not for gaming: Apple is making sure of that.

Your best bet is to use bootcamp to Windows or even to Linux.

Edit: downvoters, please justify. This is a statement of facts (OpenGL
deprecated, 64-bit removal), on-topic, and I have given the parent a tip from
my experience gaming on Mac hardware.

~~~
jedberg
> macOS is not for gaming: Apple is making sure of that.

I use it for gaming all the time. To play 20+ year old games. Hence the need
for DosBox.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Surely you must realize that there are many different kinds of gaming. When
people talk about gaming, they are referring to all of them in general, which
require 32-bit support and OpenGL support at the minimum. They are not talking
only about your niche use case.

In other words, if I only play Nethack on the terminal, do you think it is
proper that I tell you I can game on macOS, and that you shouldn't be
complaining about 64-bit DOSBox?

------
Quekid5
I like GoG. They seem quite decent and not just wanting to capture you in
their universe. Mind you, I I'm not a huge customer, but then again, maybe
they're not agressively going for Whales... which is another point in their
book to me.

I wonder if long tail can beat out whale.

------
ohithereyou
GOG games are DRM free and typically show up on torrent sites immediately
after release, so anybody who wants to pirate the game won't bother to go
through the buy->download->refund flow with them.

~~~
moosey
Inexpensive, downloadable, and DRM free games are what I always wanted. In
addition, GOG keeps a store of all the games I own and I can download them
multiple times.

This is exactly the service that I would imagine other gamers would want, as
well. It seems almost petty to torrent when this is available.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Inexpensive, why?

I really do not want a world like mobile gaming where every game is free and
designed to make you addicted to buy virtual coins.

Games cost a lot of money to make.

~~~
starving_autist
I think games cost a lot of money to make profitable (i.e. appeal to the
standards of most people).

Even if all professional game designers/programmers/artists stopped getting
paid and quit, people would still make and enjoy free games, and they would
probably much better than whatever generic crap is greenlight by publishers.

So I don't believe that the artistic value nor the quality of video games
depends on the success video game industry, In fact I would say they are
orthagonal to each other.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
I do believe the best indie games are way better than the best AAA games
(gameplay wise). But all of them are commercial. In other words, there is no
non-commercial game that I would consider the best at anything.

There are mods that are better than the games themselves, but making the base
game is what costs money and nobody does for free.

------
JohnFen
OK, I won't. I've spent a great deal of money at GOG over the years, and I
haven't yet felt a desire to seek a refund for anything. I don't expect the
future will be any different.

~~~
Quekid5
Exactly. They have nothing to lose from this... (or almost nothing). Just the
no-DRM stance saves them from soooo much random trouble due to connectivity,
etc. etc.

There was _one_ occasion when I was a little bit confused and couldn't
download my purchase... but it was really just a UI problem -- and I figured
it out. (Never reached out to support, but I'm sure they would have instantly
pointed me to the download link.)

EDIT: I'm sorry, did I say something wrong?

------
clarry
Nice, poor support and lack of refunds really discouraged me from buying from
GOG.. maybe I'll consider browsing their catalog again some day.

~~~
d1zzy
Have you interacted with both GOG support and other digital gaming sites and
those interactions were poor in comparison? In my experience GOG support has
been miles above Steam support, it was timely, on the subject and ended with a
satisfactory conclusion for both sides.

~~~
clarry
Why do I need to interact with another store before I can say my experience
with GOG has been bad?

But yes, I have been in direct contact with a publisher (who also has their
own storefront) after GOG support, expectedly (based on prior experience),
refused to support me on the grounds that they do not .. _support_ .. my
system (even though I pointed out the issue was not system specific). The
publisher had no issues supporting me, and indeed they were comparatively
quick to respond and easier to deal with than GOG.

Here's how it goes with GOG:

* Have a problem with your game? Sorry, we don't support your system (and we also release buggy games that would be easy to fix but that's the users' responsibility).

* Want refund? Sorry, refunds are for technical issues only and "we do not support your system" is not a technical issue.

* Want your forum posts deleted? Sorry, we can't do that because we'd have to delete your account and besides, it'd break threading (nevermind that moderators are already breaking threading and removing posts without deleting accounts; and threading breaks only because their software is so crap).

I haven't got a single success story to share about GOG's support. And up til
now, the lack of refunds has become a major pain point because you're not
entitled to either support or refunds if you can't get your game working on a
system GOG does not want to support.

This got worse when Judas' wine thread become a ghost town after the Linko90
fiasco, where GOG decided to side with social media outrage mob and fire their
own people and presumably make a policy change that disallows their employees
(who in the past had given unofficial but first class support on forums) from
being active members of the community. Around the same time linuxvangog
started looking for a new job; I believe GOG either fired him or pissed him
off enough to have him look for a better place.

GOG really doesn't care about Linux, which really sucks, because a lot of
Linux users do care about DRM-free games.

But hey, I've been enjoying STALKER lately thanks to you & GOG.

~~~
jorvi
> GOG really doesn't care about Linux, which really sucks, because a lot of
> Linux users do care about DRM-free games.

I think Linux users are just a slight bit entitled where it concerns gaming.
Just two examples:

1\. They want anti-cheat stripped out of games so they can play games via
Steam Proton, conveniently ignoring the fact that any multiplayer game that
does that will be flooded and destroyed by hackers

2\. They demand full support from game devs, despite only making up an
absolutely tiny fraction of the customer base. They routinely make up less
then 0.1% of sales (!), but cause 20%+ of support tickets[0]. No sane business
in the world would sink 20% of their support budget into 0.1% of their
revenue.

[0][https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760](https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760)

~~~
clarry
> 1\. They want anti-cheat stripped out of games so they can play games via
> Steam Proton, conveniently ignoring the fact that any multiplayer game that
> does that will be flooded and destroyed by hackers

Yes, I want them stripped out or made optional. I've had good times playing
multiplayer games without built-in anti-cheat systems. These are a lazy
concept in any case. Self-moderating communities are much nicer, and in any
case required to save the day when anti-cheat inevitably fails to detect (let
alone prevent) cheating.

> 2\. They demand full support from game devs, despite only making up an
> absolutely tiny fraction of the customer base. They routinely make up less
> then 0.1% of sales (!), but cause 20%+ of support tickets[0]. No sane
> business in the world would sink 20% of their support budget into 0.1% of
> their revenue.

There are games that are rock solid on Linux. There are games that I've
offered to people on a USB stick running Linux and Wine because it works
better than Windows.

So here we have an anecdote from one company and one game, and automated crash
reports are conflated with support requests so you can't even tell what's
what. Yeah, maybe their game actually crashes a lot on Linux. Sucks for them?

This is not data.

But yeah, they'll continue to make up less than 0.1% of sales when they're not
being supported.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> Self-moderating communities are much nicer

Curious how you think a game like PUBG could self-moderate cheaters out of
existence.

~~~
clarry
Given all the cheating videos I've seen, evidently they haven't been able to
come up with any automated system that does better.

It should work the way it works anywhere else: people report users that are
obviously cheating or suspected of cheating. Server flags players with
suspicious behavior. Community moderators keep watch. Replays are saved, and
anyone can watch them and report cheating. People who are detected cheating
get banned, people who play without obviously cheating gain reputation. Given
enough rep, you can access servers with more skilled players & fewer randoms
that have no rep yet. You can also have friends with enough rep vouch for you,
but there are consequences if they invite cheaters.

A lot of obvious cheating can be detected server side anyway, without
installing drm malware on clients. I've seen videos of such obvious cheating
in pubg.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Any system that involves verifying reports is a non-starter IMO. That solution
doesn't scale to a game that has millions of players.

Server-side detection really should be easy, but developers tend to write code
that gives the client too much authority so that the server code can be faster
and they can run more game instances per server. It's kind of shit, really.
You can't do anything server-side to prevent aim bots, but you can absolutely
prevent people from shooting through walls and terrain.

------
dogma1138
It was pretty clear that once they’ll become more and more popular things
would have to change.

Especially since as you grow you get into a weird point where you can start
losing a lot of money for swallowing these refunds but you don’t have enough
weight to force publishers to share the costs like Steam does.

Also since GoG has no DRM and no user activity monitoring almost no publisher
would agree to participate in refunds.

~~~
baal80spam
I love GOG but unfortunately popularity does not translate to profitability.
GOG had reported ~8000 USD profit for 2018.

I wish I'm proved wrong but I doubt this move is going to help the situation.

~~~
bradyd
Note that GOG is owned by CD Projekt, the studio behind The Witcher games and
Cyberpunk 2077. So while they may not make much on GOG itself, they make a lot
more money selling their games there then on other platforms like Steam.

~~~
shmerl
Actually in the past GOG brought them more money than their own games, so the
fact that it's not profitable isn't good.

~~~
opencl
Maybe that was true in the past, but CD Projekt Red made $28 million profit
compared to GOG's $8000 in 2018. The company as a whole is not exactly in
financial peril even if GOG is barely breaking even.

[https://www.tweaktown.com/news/65367/gog-com-barely-
making-p...](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/65367/gog-com-barely-making-
profit/index.html)

~~~
shmerl
That TW3 is profitable is good, but the store itself shouldn't be struggling,
unless something is wrong.

