Is giving mass refunds to a recently released video game a good thing?

The gaming community has constantly been changing throughout the decades. Especially with social media being involved more so than before. Some people feel that the average gamer has changed for the worse, however I think it’s actually been more for the better. In fact, because we’re more vocal nowadays, especially within the social media aspect, we seem to get immediate reactions from the developers of games we cry about. For example: No Man’s Sky.

There were a lot of promises with No Man’s Sky, however the fanbase feels that the game ultimately didn’t deliver. One of the main issues that fans had was the fact that there are over 18 quintillion planets to investigate in No Man’s Sky to explore. Yet, even though that sounded cool, you couldn’t create a proper multiplayer scenario with a friend to explore this vast amount of space together. When the name of the game was released as No Man’s Sky, we didn’t really think it would actually mean “No One In the Sky”, because that’s what it felt like even though there were supposedly other players playing.

The lack of proper structure building was also a huge downer for No Man’s Sky. The game drops you on the first planet and you’re pretty much left to just explore and gather resources. There’s literally no real building mode similar to Minecraft – in a game this massive that’s a pretty much a sin. That’s like playing Minecraft, and all you do is gather mud and bricks and do nothing with it. I mean, if you like gathering resources and doing nothing with it, that’s up to you, but for most other players there needs to be more to this madness.

Ultimately there was a large fallout from the player base and refund requests due to “false “advertising. As we all already know, this has led to Amazon and Steam giving back refunds to players even though the game has only been out for a short amount of time. Where does this ultimately take us as gamers? Well, at this point it speaks volumes because it shows that if you bang your pots and pans loud enough, you’re going to get what you ask for. This could be seen as both good and bad, but this is a large step in the gaming community. This at least shows that they’re listening to the community and to not make sugared promises.

Refunds aren’t uncommon for video games. They’ve been processing these kinds of requests since I first bought Ion Storm’s Daikatana for the PC many years ago (Man that game sucked so much. Seriously, wtf was John Romero thinking at that time?!).  However, game developers and publishers probably haven’t experienced something as massive as this kind of backlash for a game that was this hyped – no wait, we actually did. Anyone remember Mass Effect 3 and that crappy ending to a beautiful trilogy? Where’s my damned money, EA GAMES!!!??