Should gamers be able to get a refund if a game is broken at launch such as Unity and Halo: MCC?

[VanceIX]

aLkaLiNE said:

Now we're moving goal posts.  The people saying we should focus on restraint say something along the lines of 'well you should check out reviews before buying and do your research' to which people on the other side of the fence say 'yeah but reviewers are biased and dont always reflect the true nature of a game'.

 

So now, we should disregard the reviews but only for the first week and THEN proceed from there?  This is ridiculous.  It's entirely ridiculous that some of you actually defend the devs putting out incomplete games because of our increasing reliance of online patches.  Its misleading, its false advertising, its mismanagement and at the end of the day it achieves nothing positive for the gamer.  WHY IN THE HELL should I be punished for not watching an entire playthrough of every game I want to purchase online? Who has that kind of time?!?The fault, the blame and the punishment are not yours to bear for being given false information.  That blame lies elsewhere and I'm rather surprised this many users see otherwise.

EDIT  - Oh and btw, Devs are more now than ever before offering incentive to preorder which is basically you the consumer commiting to a day 1 buy.  We're being bribed to purchase games on or even before launch.  'Well dont buy day 1'. Well don't offer me some free DLC. Well dont lie in your reviews.  Well DEVELOP your f***ing game!

You have completely misunderstood what I'm trying to say. I said that you need to give the game a week for people to find said game breaking bugs, and then make a decision on it. People who pre-order have what's coming to them, especially since most "incentives" are pure garbage (a mission or some armor? OK). Gamers need to take both critic and user feedback in to account before making a purchase. Anything else is on them. It's been this way since the industry first took off, and it is the way with all the industries in the world. 

You have no one to blame but yourself if you feel the need to pre-order and then get dejected when the game doesn't live up to expectations for the first month. Consumers need to do research and be patient, that's the only way these companies will be taught a lesson. If a game is broken, don't buy it until it's fixed, or don't buy it at all even. 

If for some reason refunds were possible, I doubt anything would change. For one, the refund period would need to be absurdly short (a week at most, and that's really pushing it), since people can beat a game within a couple of days and then return it with some BS excuse on a game-breaking bug to buy a new one. Secondly, how many people who actually do want to return it will have the time? Tons of games are bought and not even played in the first few days. Most people don't even frequent game sites, so they wouldn't know about most of the issues. A lot wouldn't even care. Companies would lose almost no money, since the refunds would still be a miniscule amount compared to those that just kept the game. And I'm not even going to go in to the tax payer money that would be wasted on an agency to determine what exactly makes a game broken.

No, it's better for everyone to be better consumers and be smarter about it. That way, there will be no need for bad/limiting return policies, and pre-order bonsues will disappear.