Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyrocat | Hacker News Reader

Uh, that's never happened to me, nor anyone I know. And Steam Quality Control is good enough that games that bug-ridden will very very rarely make it through.

View on HN

As someone who released a game on steam, they never checked it. We could have released a game that crashed on start up and they wouldn't have known before hand.

I'm not complaining. It's great for developers.

Steam envisions itself more as an open platform than a storefront. I don't have an opinion on whether this is the best choice or not, but that's the direction they have said they are moving in. The GP's complaint seems more like a consequence of that general direction that a consequence of Valve's attitude as a business, as they generally (only generally) have a track record of being relatively consumer friendly. And in the specific industry of games publishers, they are practically saints.

You could roll out a day one bugfix to every user and force an update.

And it's their duty to know that your game works?

Perhaps you should read the context of a thread before mindlessly posting.

His comment was in response to : > Uh, that's never happened to me, nor anyone I know. And Steam Quality Control is good enough that games that bug-ridden will very very rarely make it through.

So, uhh, yeah it's their responsibility to check a game because once it is available on Steam they're vouching for its quality in some manner.

As long as they aren't giving you refunds for games that don't, yeah, it's their duty to make sure that games which are technically unreliable don't make it to the store. Either that, or hand out refunds.

In my mind there should be a refund from Steam either way:

- If Steam has a thorough quality control, they (sort of) tell you that the game is OK, no obvious bugs. But there could still exist a serious bug that you can find, and I think they should give you a refund. They said it would work and it didn't.

- If there's no quality control to speak of (i.e. they just sell whatever the developers are shipping) and it turns out to be crap, it's still Steam who has sold it to you. In my mind they should still give you a refund, apologize a bit, and then deal with the developer.

I can't see that it's Steam's responsibility to test the game, but it's in their interest to provide high quality, so they ought to do some smoke tests at the very least. But no testing (from Steam and/or the developer) can guarantee that there's no problem with the software, and if there is, I think it's obvious that Steam should handle the refunds to the customer (since it's Steam's customer), and then Steam should handle it with the developer.

Yes, I agree that Steam should be issuing refunds -- but even more so when they don't do any compliance testing of their own.

In the iOS App Store, Apple can issue refunds if a user complains about an app. If they do, they'll refund the entire purchase price, but keep their 30% commission.

In other words, it costs developers money for Apple to issue a refund.

It has happened to me. I purchased a game and the multiplayer was completely broken/bugged. Like most people, I thought Steam would refund me without much of a hassle. Turns out steam has a very strict NO REFUND policy. This came as a shock to me after hearing so many good stories about Steam. Note that this was a well documented bug in the steam forums for this game.

I used to feel very safe purchasing from steam, now I don't think it's very safe to purchase any sort of indie game.

The recent Ashes 2013 cricket game was so bug-ridden it was taken off Steam after less than a week. It looks like all refunds were handled by the publisher though:

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/12/02/ashes-cricket-2013-pulled-...

Dungeon Defenders is fairly unplayable on desktop Linux due to this bug: https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5831

This bug is easy to reproduce and they even know the issue (lack of physx support on the linux drivers) and even though there's a workaround (Android version doesn't have this issue) the devs still haven't fixed it. They could at the very least stop selling new copies to Linux users on Steam until this is fixed.

Plants Vs Zombies.

If you have an account on a PC and an account on a Mac they will either destroy each other's cloud saves or refuse to start.

There is a way to get rid of the cloud save but you lose your progress. It happened to me and I was pretty pissed.

Recently found out that you can switch off the cloud saves on the Mac, then purge some config stuff and play it offline. You won't get your progress from the PC side but at least you won't destroy it either.

Only a year late. :-D

Then you have never tried to purchase linux games on Steam.

I have a modest library of games, and I have quite a few of these I bought for when I boot to Linux. Almost none of these games work.

While I have not sought a refund, or anything from Steam - it can be common to buy a game on steam and not be able to run it.

Pretty sure that story is going to change drastically once games are made for SteamOS rather than Steam on Linux. Going to be a non-issue eventually.

Crasher, WarZ, those are the two I can think of off hand.

They removed WarZ and even offered refunds after a bunch of complaints.

>They removed WarZ

Actually, they didn't. All the developers did was have it relisted under a different name ("Infestation: Survivor Stories").

http://steamcommunity.com/app/226700

Actually they did, and then had it relisted. It was later renamed because Paramount filed a lawsuit against them.

X:Rebirth.

Totally unplayable... (4.6ghz 8core 15fps)

Jagged Alliance Online.

The game was advertised as it works on OSX, but it doesn't work on Mavericks, and still has issues in other cat versions. Read here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/218450/discussions/0/846955554...

Let's not forget Day One: Garry's Incident, how can a game like this be allowed on the store is beyond me.

You played Nether recently?

I haven't, that's how much it sucks.

I'm still hoping they pull it together but the last time I looked at it, it was atrocious.

You mean the game that's in EARLY ACCESS?

You got what you bought there.

I had that problem with Saints Row 2. It didn't run on my OS properly at all.

I've owned L.A. Noire for over a year and I've never been able to play it because of a rare and enduring "synchronizing bug." I've probably spent 16 hours researching, twiddling and reinstalling to try to get it to work.

The only good news is I got it on deep deep discount during last year's Christmas sale.

You didn't buy Age of Empires II HD, obviously.

I've never had any issues with that one?

Haven't been able to get AntiChamber to launch without crashing

Just to provide a counterpoint, I've never had a problem with Antichamber, and it is a very, very good game.

Sorry to hear about your difficulties though!

Godus has those very issues.

As other's have pointed out that Godus is an alpha game much of it has not been written yet. It is probably over a year from being a good game. The issue is this is not communicated well enough to people purchasing, as illustrated by the above comment. If Hooch expected Godus to be a bug ridden when purchasing their wouldn't be any surprise when he discover it was bug ridden. One idea I could see would be for Steam to require developers to list a sample of issues the game currently has in the promotional video. Introversion does this well with their game Prison Architect http://youtu.be/KDDzSOS0vzc?t=1m6s . I see this serving a similar purpose to the Risks & Challenges section on Kickstarter, warning the customer that they are not buying a game with the typical protections and warranties they are used to.

I expect to be able to actually run the game instead of it crashing as soon as I double click on the icon. I'd probably have no issue with it, if I could actually get it to run. Then there is the whole no refund issue with Steam.

Isn't Godus explicitly a "This is an early access beta version" release?

It's an alpha/beta and looks like they are finally going to put in the bits and pieces to make it a real simulation.

Conversely, I have a friend that used to play Godus every day before he moved to some other game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com