GOG extends refund policy to 30 days with no hard limits on playtime

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: GOG’s recently updated refund policy might be the most generous in the industry. The voluntary update allows for a full refund up to 30 days after purchasing a game or DLC, even if you have already downloaded, launched and played it.

Notably, GOG’s FAQ on the matter doesn’t mention any hard limits on the amount of time you can play a game before requesting a refund within the 30-day window.

No matter how you slice it, a refund policy with this much leeway is ripe for abuse. GOG isn’t blind to the fact, noting that it will be monitoring things to make sure no one is using it to “hurt the developers that put their time and heart into making great games.” As such, GOG reserves the right to refuse refunds in such individual cases.

Elaborating on it a bit more, GOG said they trust users to make informed purchasing decisions and to limit the use of the updated policy only if something doesn’t work as expected.

Please respect all the time and hard work put into making the games you play and remember that refunds are not reviews. If you finished the game and didn't like it, please consider sharing your opinion instead. Also, please don't take advantage of our trust by asking for an unreasonable amount of games to be refunded. Don't be that person. No one likes that person.

In comparison, Valve and Epic Games will issue a refund within two weeks of purchase, so long as you’ve logged less than two hours of playtime.

Can GOG trust that gamers will do the right thing and respect the policy or will a few bad apples ruin it for everyone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Masthead credit: Controller by nhungboon. Refund by Artem Samokhvalov.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/84170-gog-extends-refund-policy-30-days-no-hard.html

 

[Polycount]

As far as I know, they've always had a 30-day refund policy with no limits on playtime, but only for technical issues where you can't get the game to run, and you have to work with support to try to fix it before they'll grant a refund.

Are those requirements lifted now?

 

[Lew Zealand]

They'll probably flag people who are continually returning things, like Amazon does. Don't abuse the system or you get the boot.

 

[OptimumSlinky]

They'll probably flag people who are continually returning things, like Amazon does. Don't abuse the system or you get the boot.

Hopefully this. Sadly, if you give people an inch they tend to take a mile and be awful. I like GOG a lot, so I hope this pro-consumer stance helps them grow.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Sales must be down. Two weeks is already more than enough time.

 

[m4a4]

I wouldn't be surprised if people try taking advantage of this. I think it's bound to hurt the smaller devs where sales matter most (and it's meant to be a shorter, quality experience).

I hope they do pay enough attention...

 

[ShagnWagn]

Whoa, this is awesome! steam just got kicked into the corner. I doubt I will buy from steam again minus expansion packs for games I own there (I've never purchased micro DLC). I would love to move my games from steam to a gog, or really get away from a game client altogether.

Given the abundance of terrible games out there, I hope it doesn't seem like the legit customers are abusing it. There are several on steam I wish I could get my money back on.

 

[ubronan]

I actually do try to solve the issues with games before I even consider a refund.
That often lost me the option to get the money back at all, most game developers never reacted before 3 to 4 weeks had passed.
Then steam said yes but you can not get a refund its too long ago.
The last game I bought is also a problem game, so I ran into issues that the game totally hangs my system. Only pulling the power of the machine will get it back alive.
So I first thought it might be my machine and started seeking what could potentially be the culpritt, basically I did not even consider the game being the one failing.
I changed drivers and checked logs and tested hours, but everytime the same after a while it stops and I have to pull the power again.
Hell I even blamed gog galaxy 2.0 because that seemed to crash as well.
But because I could not get it to run even at lowest settings stable I send the game developer several emails.
Well that was more than a month ago, and till today no answer from them.
So back at the story after weeks struggling with this PC Building Sim.
I decided to install steam on the I5 nuc of the lady and tried to run the game there, well no go either, but weird enough a tad better than on my nice fast game pc.
It runs again for a while but after some time it also crashes on that little machine.
Sometimes after a few minutes game time , but often I can play a half hour up to about 3 hours.
But with the difference that it actually only crashes the game and I can send crash reports from that game to M$.
Ofcourse while I was typing this post the NUC started beeping and it hung just like the big game pc......
Anyway I also tried this game on my I7 gaming laptop which ended in the same result, the game crashes after some time.
When its crashed I have to hold the power button to get it to power down and than its again rinse and repeat.
Reinstalling the Os did not help either, putting a clean image back did nothing either.
So its 1000% the game giving me this problems, but I am actually very angry that the game developers totally refused to answer any of my emails.
So giving this fact that even after I think now 6 weeks not getting response from game developers a month it actually way too short.
But GOG deal is much better than steam does.
Steam almost allways find an excuse to refuse the payback.
While I actually never requested a payback ever before that they simply allways find a way to give you nothing.
The same goes for the money you put into their wallet, your money is simply locked and they never pay it back. So I actually now am waiting to find a game which costs about the same as in my wallet and spend it.
But by now I actually hate steam, its the worst platform to be on, sadly I have hundreds of games on it. But if I could I would pull them all out with serial numbers or whatever and would play without that disaster product.

 

[Capaill]

But GOG deal is much better than steam does.
Steam almost allways find an excuse to refuse the payback.

I've seen console gamers (xbox and PS) also complaining of crashes with that game, that required them to restart their console. I guess you should have applied for the refund within the 2 weeks.
I've only asked Steam for a refund once and they gave it to me.
I read an article recently about Steam and all their poor practices. It stated that Steam only implemented the refund policy as it's illegal in some countries to not have one. But they made it as restrictive as possible.
On the other hand, if they loosen the refund policy to, eg. 30 days and 24 hours of gameplay, the refunds will be heavily abused by players buying short games, playing them in full and then getting a refund.

For the GOG change, I expect most of the current GOG gamers to respect it. Newer gamers, enticed in by the loose refund policy, may abuse it heavily. I would suggest a solution where GOG have visibility of in-game achievements and use that to determine how far into the game, the gamer got. Perhaps have new achievements added to show how much time was spent playing in-game, as opposed to staring at the menu and troubleshooting.

 

[ShagnWagn]

I actually do try to solve the issues with games before I even consider a refund.
That often lost me the option to get the money back at all, most game developers never reacted before 3 to 4 weeks had passed.
Then steam said yes but you can not get a refund its too long ago.
The last game I bought is also a problem game, so I ran into issues that the game totally hangs my system. Only pulling the power of the machine will get it back alive.
So I first thought it might be my machine and started seeking what could potentially be the culpritt, basically I did not even consider the game being the one failing.
I changed drivers and checked logs and tested hours, but everytime the same after a while it stops and I have to pull the power again.
Hell I even blamed gog galaxy 2.0 because that seemed to crash as well.
But because I could not get it to run even at lowest settings stable I send the game developer several emails.
Well that was more than a month ago, and till today no answer from them.
So back at the story after weeks struggling with this PC Building Sim.
I decided to install steam on the I5 nuc of the lady and tried to run the game there, well no go either, but weird enough a tad better than on my nice fast game pc.
It runs again for a while but after some time it also crashes on that little machine.
Sometimes after a few minutes game time , but often I can play a half hour up to about 3 hours.
But with the difference that it actually only crashes the game and I can send crash reports from that game to M$.
Ofcourse while I was typing this post the NUC started beeping and it hung just like the big game pc......
Anyway I also tried this game on my I7 gaming laptop which ended in the same result, the game crashes after some time.
When its crashed I have to hold the power button to get it to power down and than its again rinse and repeat.
Reinstalling the Os did not help either, putting a clean image back did nothing either.
So its 1000% the game giving me this problems, but I am actually very angry that the game developers totally refused to answer any of my emails.
So giving this fact that even after I think now 6 weeks not getting response from game developers a month it actually way too short.
But GOG deal is much better than steam does.
Steam almost allways find an excuse to refuse the payback.
While I actually never requested a payback ever before that they simply allways find a way to give you nothing.
The same goes for the money you put into their wallet, your money is simply locked and they never pay it back. So I actually now am waiting to find a game which costs about the same as in my wallet and spend it.
But by now I actually hate steam, its the worst platform to be on, sadly I have hundreds of games on it. But if I could I would pull them all out with serial numbers or whatever and would play without that disaster product.

When something like this happens, I file a dispute with my credit card company. Most are pretty lenient up to around two months old. I went several months before filing a dispute on one because the company just kept dragging me along with promises. I had evidence I kept trying to contact them with no progress, so the credit card company refunded me the money.