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

[Aielyn]

For those who are asserting that you should hold off and wait for opinions first, before buying... If everybody did this, nobody would get the game, and thus no opinions would be made available. It's a completely non-feasible assertion.

And beyond that, releasing a decidedly buggy game at retail and then fixing it after that is using the paying customer as beta testers - rather than paying people to test their game, the people are having to pay to do the testing. And that's just plain wrong. If you make a purchase in full faith that you're getting a finished product, only to get a buggy mess, then you should be compensated for your beta testing.

Note that we're not talking about BAD games. We're talking about BUGGY, BROKEN games. Of course, all of this is just a solid demonstration that all three hardware makers should be maintaining a "seal of quality" program that allows buyers to know that the game they're buying is free of major and obvious bugs (minor glitches and rare bugs can slip through beta testing, but the major issues shouldn't happen). Nintendo appears to do this for eShop exclusive releases... but they need to do it for retail (like Sonic Boom). MS and Sony should be doing it, too.

The issue at hand is that there is currently no real incentive for devs to make sure their products are up to scratch on release. They can save time and money by skipping all of their beta testing, and instead use their customers. And while it's all well and good to go "stupid customers are buying at launch", that doesn't address the problem. There will always be stupid customers - it's why shampoo bottles have "for external use only", after all.

If developers had to refund the cost of the game in the situation in which it was truly buggy, it would provide an incentive for them to ensure their products are functional, because otherwise they go bankrupt. And if we included such a mechanism, you can bet that there would be fewer bad games, too.

Of course, the challenge is coming up with a feasible way of implementing it. But asserting that we should blame the people who buy the games at launch is really just a case of victim blaming, and does nothing to address the problem at hand. I know a few things repeated in there, but consider it "extra emphasis".