How fitting. A week after Peter writes a piece about how Steam’s refund policy is garbage, GOG hurls an email at me explaining that they’re changing their own refund policy.
GOG are describing their new policy as “a 100% money back guarantee on the functionality of all its games for PC and Mac users everywhere in the world,” which sounds like good news to me. The gist of it is that, if you purchase a game and GOG’s support team can’t get it working on your computer within 30 days (and your computer meets the system requirements on the game page), you get your money back. In short: if the game should work, doesn’t work, they can’t make it work, then you get a refund. Which seems pretty fair to me.
This wouldn’t necessarily help with stuff like X Rebirth or Aliens: Colonial Marines, where the problem is more “the game doesn’t actually work properly for anyone“, but considering GOG’s catalogue is geared more towards both older titles and the indie side of things, I don’t think it’s something they’re likely to encounter too often. That said, there’s precedent that they’d be pretty fair to the consumer even if that did happen – when Dark Matter suffered a bit of controversy for not actually being a finished game, they offered refunds.
GOG states that this reflects both trust in its games, and the gamers using its service. This guarantee means that the games they offer will have to be extensively tested by GOG itself (or the company will lose quite a lot of money to refunds) and since GOG can’t really deactivate the DRM free titles it offers, they’re also trusting their users to play fair.
From what I can gather this new guarantee will become active today. Hurrah!
