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JWeinCom on 18 December 2020
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SvennoJ said:
JWeinCom said:

“There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."

I worked at Best Buy... A manager could always at their discretion return an opened game, but it was pretty rare that it would actually happen. First time to my knowledge that it could be done for an entire SKU.

I once had someone try to return a copy of GTAV because it was in spanish... They didn't have a receipt and the SKU for that version wasn't in our system. Obviously they'd bought the game from some small mom and pop shop that broke street date and were trying to return it to us XD.  

I tried to return a game once because it was faulty, but they would only exchange it for another copy of the same faulty game. I took the exchange, at least they got the hassle of restocking it. But indeed, people will take advantage whenever possible, hence de-listing is the best option.

It seems it just Steam and GoG now that won't refund the (PC) game. There are plenty people on the Steam forums trying to get a refund after running into game breaking performance bugs and other game breaking bugs, passed the 2 hour refund limit. It seems to be the same as with Sony returns. You need to keep trying until you get the right person to help you, if you can figure out how to get to talk to a person in the first place. The did make an exception with FS2020 since the installation time counts as play time (Steam only installs the installer, then the game downloads for hours in the installer counting as play time)

There must be a better way to handle refunds. How long is it acceptable to return your meal. What would a customer satisfaction guarantee look like for games.

Yeah, generally you could only return a game because it's faulty. Because... realistically, Best Buy can't guarantee the quality of every game, nor can Sony. If the game disc was actually faulty and it wouldn't run, then that's something we could send back to the company and they'd reimburse us for.

A few times they'd actually have someone from gaming come and check the game on the PS3 we had in the break room to see if it actually wasn't working. Or, if it was a DS/3ds game I'd generally test in on the floor and be like "Oh see it's working fine! YAY FOR YOU!" And the customer would have to stop bullshitting and be like ... "oh... thanks... but my son/daughter really just didn't like the game". 

In the case of a game like Cyberpunk however, giving a new copy obviously won't solve the issue, so exchanging for a new copy wouldn't work. Since the company admitted the game was unplayable, I'm guessing that they'll basically have to repay Best Buy for any returned copies or risk a lawsuit. If CDProject hadn't already made a public statement, idk what Bestbuy would do. It'd be a rough position.

Having worked on the retail side though... People will try to take advantage. So, if your criteria is that you can return it whenever you like, then you'll get tons of people who play the game, beat it, and two weeks later come in saying "oh the game doesn't work at point x". It may be different with digital copies, but it's hard to manage from a retailer perspective. Like I said at Best Buy, we'd actually sometimes ask what the bug was and try to play that part of the game, but that's not always possible. Unfortunately, shitty customers ruin it for everyone.