About a year ago, we used a similar headline as we watched Big Picture Mode make playing PC on your living room TV far more convenient via an interface designed to be entirely used with your controller if you desired. At the same time, we saw Nvidia announce the Geforce Experience, a system that would custom-setup your game for you so that it took the maximum advantage of the setup in your PC (provided you are using their graphic card of course). But this is only the beginning. Step on in to see the new frontier to make PC gamers more secure in their purchases.
Despite all the things in our intro, there can still be issues with how games work. As of late, we can look to examples like Battlefield 4, a game so broken across all platforms EA announced last week that DICE is not working on any new projects so they can fix their bullshit. But sadly, new games being released broken in an age where “we can fix it with a patch” by AAA studios is sadly nothing new to gamers, and a machine like PC where most games now are bought digitally, you are pretty much Shit out of Luck if you are caught by it… or so it was.
However, EA actually DID do something new for PC gamers in this area: Anyone who bought this broken shit on Origin could return the game within 7 days for a full refund to their credit card. This did not help anyone pre-ordering the game (since this policy would only work for 7 days AFTER you paid up… this was not about if the game worked, but a no questions asked policy, after all), but for the gamer burned by pre-orders today and thinking $10 off wasn’t worth it, this had to have been a good thing to know about.
But it doesn’t help out with gamers who are reluctant to pull the trigger to play that old game they were told about that was awesome, but can be a pain in the balls to make work on a modern machine, and this is where most of the reputation for games not working on PC comes from: Ancient games built around ancient technology in ancient versions of Windows. They work, but they often work after being custom patched by a dedicated fan-base and/or custom settings places on them or the PC itself.
Gog.com came around and became an immediate fix to a lot of this, offering a library of titles that were updated to work on modern machines for $5-$20 as well as a selection of modern titles stripped of any DRM, it became a very viable solution to a lot of players who wanted to go back to classics they never got to play… and yet the risk was still there. As of today, it no longer exists.
Gog.com, following in EA’s footsteps, has offered their own money back return policy, and for gamers worried about the game working, it’s even better then EA’s. First and foremost, as long as you didn’t download the the title, you have 14 days to return the game, no questions aske. Second, if you did download the game and find it’s not working, you have 30 days to submit a ticket to Gog.com about it. If they can’t fix your game, they will refund you the price…. for ANYTHING IN THEIR LIBRARY, not just 1st party games. Now we are just waiting for Steam to do something similar, and here at Red Sector, we will have seen all our major PC game sources just make digital gaming effectively risk free to the consumer.
Kinda odd that Steam got left behind, considering how far ahead they are in most other ways to the other two, but… hey! Progress is progress… and where Gog.com deals with the most troublesome software with the least official support for most of their library (the classics), this is a HUGE step in the right direction for the platform!
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