After building up “terrifying” hype, Hello Games had the most successful Steam launch of the year when it debuted No Man’s Sky earlier this month. Since then, the studio has been dealing with complaints from players who feel the game didn’t live up to their expectations.
As you might expect, refund requests are a part of that conversation, and over the weekend posts cropped up on websites like NeoGAF and Reddit claiming that some No Man’s Sky owners were asking for — and receiving — refunds after playing the game for as long as 50 or more hours.
While the veracity of these self-reported claims is unclear (Valve has since appended a special notice to the game’s Steam page noting that “the standard Steam refund policy applies to No Man’s Sky”), they managed to spark further public conversation among devs about refund policies on Steam and other game marketplaces.
More specifically, should customers ask for their money back after playing a significant amount (well over two hours) of a game, even if that game is marketed as a vast digital space? How should devs feel about refund requests, and how can they design games that don’t incite them?
Many devs made smart, salient points about these issues on Twitter over the past few days, so we’ve taken the liberty of embedding some of them below so you can click through and real their thoughts in full.