I'm not exactly excited for the middle future we're going to have to get through.
Sure, but those companies do not have brick and mortar stores where they sell inventory. It's always been a distributors market, shouldn't the distributor service you? What else is their cut for?
Having a retail person give game recommendations has kind of been obsoleted by youtube and the wider internet. "top 10" lists do a good job of showing you what the hottest stuff in each category is.
$60 is an expensive AAA game by Steam standards and almost certainly comes with entirely too much content to appease people who think they need a lot of content to justify paying $60.
$60 is also what your average NES game retailed for, which would in today's money be over $200. And most of them were complete garbage.
Most games today that aren't AAA titles, which is to say the actually interesting games, go for a lot less than $60 anyway. A $20 game is the cost of one decent meal out.
Without refunds I would simply not purchase one unless I was sure it was good value, but with refunds I will buy something based on a few pictures on the store and see if I like it.
Of course, if what they advertise is misleading then that's a different story.
What logical difference is there between studying the reviews and screenshots over playing the game for 30 minutes and working out yourself if you like it?
Actually I don't think that's necessarily true. We tend to be more judgmental of things we get for free than things we had some investment in. By having a "demo-style" return policy you're possibly being more critical of the game than you would be if you had no opportunity to get your money back. Not to mention the scheme's effect on shorter works. You could play all of a one hour game and then decide after the fact it wasn't worth the money. At least one developer has quit game development because of this, which means that there is a pressure to ensure that every game on Steam lasts at least two hours, and that'll probably take the form of having the best stuff locked away until after the two hour mark.
> What logical difference is there between studying the reviews and screenshots over playing the game for 30 minutes and working out yourself if you like it?
I'll admit, I can't meaningfully articulate the difference it makes when you pay for a game and then take your money back vs not paying for it.
But consider this: how would a 30 minute demo of a game be different than the first 30 minutes of the full game? Like screenshots and reviews it would be designed to give you an overview of the complete game experience it is trying to sell you, whereas the first 30 minutes are what is necessary to get the game going.
This is what the market of gamers are demanding and I do not see that changing or that it is an issue. These days it is common for people to spend huge amounts of time on a single game. It is completely normal for someone to say "I have spent 1000 hours on Minecraft/CSGO/Skyrim over the last 10 years" so companies have to adapt to building games that last a decade and can generate recurring sales through things like graphical updates and extra content.
New PS2 games cost around $50 USD back in the 2000s and most new PS4 games actually cost less now when you account for inflation.
Where does it say that?
The best quote I could find from them:
>Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.
Literally the first paragraph on the refunds page.
> You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.
I have refunded about 40 purchases on steam and never had them denied if you fit in the 2 hours / 2 weeks rule.
It’s so much cheaper to ship units to a few central warehouses of your distributors and then let them handle getting it in the shelves into 100,000+ stores nationwide. And your distributor handles all the retail risk for you, you don’t have to figure out where to build stores, how many to have, how to attract customers, worry about real-estate or rents.
But as in the olden days, store staff have a role in solving "I wish I knew X or Y" kind of issues: basically the less verse a user is in the field the more the store can step in and help.
There's recommendations, but there also will be small info that is not obvious, like Switch's dock needing special USB chargers, or how language switch works, or what kind of violence there actually is in a game etc. All that info is available somewhere online, but for people who didn't/don't want to spend the time to get up to speed, knowledgeable staff is a boon.
Your method has caused a lot of upset when the parent comes back with the wrong game or for the wrong console.
But yes, while distributors can in theory be useful to customers, I think we’re seeing the end of that business model. And not just in games; car dealerships no longer provide a necessary service. Bookstores and music stores too. Apple made a killing by bypassing distributors, primarily because they could afford to give greater hands–on access to actual phones when people visited the stores.
If a bookstore or game store owner wants the business of recommending things to remain, they shouldn’t try to tie it to a physical store, to inventory and payment processing. All of those things are commodities, while the recommendations need not be, if they are good enough. They should make it a subscription service of it’s own; provide none of the store–related things, just the one–on–one conversation and recommendation.
The owner tries to federate people around the shop, and sell his stuff along the way. In the case of a game store, he may organize tournaments, special events around the release of a game, help discover some obscure games, hunt down rare items and imports, and of course give competent advise.
The average, however, wasn’t so great and probably had issues with location/hours/atmosphere which turned off many people (e.g. how many women avoided certain shops due to common behaviors of male clerks?) so there was a large enough underserved market for online stores to tap into.
How do we stop corruption if there is a never ending supply of people willing to use deceit to get ahead? Fake reviews, shills, politicians for sale... on what front are people willing to be principled? I think they need to have something at stake, like reputation, at least.
Back to the customer service at games retailers thing, do you think they were ever pure in motive, as far as helping the customer? It was probably a choice that some made, but sales people often have incentives to mislead. I'm sure sometimes the employees were pressured to push certain products, like how warranties get pushed at some retailers.