He isn’t saying you should be banned for “telling the truth” as you see it. He says that because you openly admitted to pirating games on this very forum, which if I recall correctly is against the board rules. Don’t try to project your behavior on everyone else in order to justify it. There is no excuse to pirate games, movies or music with how easy it is to not only obtain them legally but also the modern era of YouTube which allows for far more information to be culled by prospective buyers.
You either aren’t reading what I wrote, or you are just content with setting up straw man arguments and then taking them down. There were no problems with my assets. The 30+ refunds I had during the time of the original policy weren’t requested because people had issues. They were requested because people could save $60 by writing a few lines in an email. You are conflating the when bringing up the two failed refund requests of this year. Those results highlight how the new policy helps to protect sellers from false claims, while the previous policy did not.
You’d have a better time being taken seriously if you actually responded to posts based on the merits rather than inserting your own narrative into someone else’s mouth and proceeding to take that apart.
Prefacing your responses with that line about not being anti seller does not negate what follows. I’m sorry that the 30+ refunds on my end alone aren’t enough to justify the previous policy as a real problem to you. But to someone who was working on the marketplace full time, that is a serious problem. That was $1260+ which was taken from me for no legitimate reason at all, other than that they could. You’re making wild assumptions and giving out baseless percentage rates to a problem that you did not even experience. The flawed argument you pose is the same one often times used to justify piracy.
If you can’t understand the perfectly parallel analogies I have provided, then that explains why you continue to arrive at your position. My analogies are 1:1 and were provided in response to the inequitable comparisons of the Steam refund policy which is backed by DRM and other digital distributors who are in line with Epic’s current policy. Clearly there’s no point in furthering discussion because many seem to have made up their mind regardless of facts or experience.
This is not true. Once a game has been approved for refund, if you launch it you will be taken directly to the Steam store. If you launch a game prior to the refund being approved after it has been requested, the refund will be denied and you will retain ownership of that game.
I know that what I described is the case; I have a game that I have taken a refund on, that is still installed on my machine - after receiving the refund I discovered it could still be launched through Steam. Many games also do not require to be launched through Steam, and Steam can be run ‘offline’ so that it cannot verify whether your copy is legit or not (but you can still install things).
I’m speaking from personal experience. You’re telling me that once you launched the game you are able to play it? If so then there must be a bug because my refunded game took me to the steam store, and this was about a month ago.
An example of this is Kerbal Space Program, you don’t need steam running to launch it. The big AAA titles won’t work anymore, but a lot of indie games will.
EDIT: For the record yes I do own it, never returned it.
Some of the AAA games can run without it too - not naming any game names for obvious reasons, it’s entirely possible to package up a Steam copy (using the Steam archiving tool), move it to another PC and unpack it in Steam, and still play it. Steam’s DRM doesn’t actually work all that well.
They are, I think this is more of a choice the developer made. It’s not all indie games and it’s not forced upon them or anything, some dev’s just don’t like DRM.
And yo guys should take into account that non-native english speaking persons build their sentences different, and i actually forgot a “would” (two to be exact, but one in my language) in there. And then i made the mistake to answer on the following 2 posts (in a stupid way, yes).
You can see this in all of my posts. The way the sentences are built is not very “english” - it is mixed. (this is why most of my posts get edited later, because i messed up the spelling, or forgot whole words)
You can start a witch-hunt, if you want, but do you really want that? (i even showed that i own a lot of games, some twice, and you still try to start a fight a day later?)
If you want to talk about this, do it via PM, i have no interest in getting clubbed by mods for de-railing a whole Topic.
TES5: Skyrim had this too, when it launched, but it got fixed with a ninja-patch shortly after release. (you could start the game without even starting Steam. So you could in theory hust copy the skyrim-folder somewhere else and play.)
If you don’t want to continue discussing that’s up to you, however I haven’t made my mind up about anything.
The analogy comment wasn’t directed at you specifically. The point was just that people are comparing it to things as unrelated as music and games. Assets such as models are somewhat closer to music in the sense that if you get a refund but keep the asset, you haven’t lost much (though the risks of then using it in a released game mean that refunds of even these kind of assets cannot be so easily abused as in the case of digital assets such as music). Things like blueprint or code systems on the other hand are utterly different - you give up a lot by foregoing updates and support, in many cases to the point where the asset becomes more or less worthless. There is a whole spectrum of digital assets, just saying that refund policy X should obviously be used because it’s standard for digital assets is oversimplifying.
I don’t believe it’s a wild assumption to think that people frequenting pirate sites are unlikely to be considering paying legitimately for assets. Take with my arbitrary percentage if you want, I was just trying to get a point across.
As to my initial point, I guess I didn’t express it well enough. It sucks if you see you’ve made sales, only later to see they got refunded, right? You feel like you lost money. But in reality you only really lost out if somebody got something for free. If they just legitimately returned it because it turned out not to be what they wanted, then you didn’t lose anything - they just reverted to being another person that doesn’t own your asset. So as I said right at the start, it comes down to the question of whether a lot of people were actually doing this. I’m completely open to the possibility that they were, I just haven’t actually seen any evidence as yet. I think you can see that saying “I had 30+ refunds when it was easy to get a refund” is not itself evidence that people were abusing the system.
To put it another way - if in some hypothetical world, you could be 100% certain that nobody was continuing to use the asset after refunding it, would you still maintain that “I don’t like it” is not sufficient reason to grant a refund, despite the fact that the process of sale/refund costs you nothing? If the answer is yes, then I guess we just disagree fundamentally on a moral level.
Your original post was also edited to redact the reasons for the refund. Posting private correspondence between staff members are one thing (and that wasn’t what you did for the record), but if you can’t even talk about the reasons that someone is requesting a refund in a public manner that is beyond draconian.
I can tell you from experience the other day that no, they do not. It wasn’t until I had to write a very angry email with a power point presentation-esque image to Stephanie about the blatant ignoring of the evidence I provided that I was able to get results. The way sellers are treated has been unacceptable for a while, and it is bordering into territory where you have to wonder whether it’s worth continuing in this business at all.
Aparently whatever evidence I provide in private is being ignored and never looked at. I don’t know why we are notified about the refund then. I’m not trying to make enemies I’m simply amazed a landscape floating in the air is accepted as a reason for refund.
Paragon’s landscape is floating in the air as well. Gears of War’s landscapes is floating in the air as well.
When the people passing judgement on refunds aren’t experienced in our respective areas of expertise, you get results like this. You wouldn’t believe some of the insane false claims a user tried pin on my product the other day, and the fact that the staff initially accepted it as truth despite the overwhelming evidence I provided. (which was never even looked at until my follow up message).
People see how epic approaches to refunds and get motivated to give it a try. Tomorrow more people apply for refunds because the landscapes are floating in the air…
I guess when you get to the point of dismissing specific points out of hand because of some perceived general notion that you’ve decided I’m perpetuating, then yeah, it doesn’t make sense to continue discussion.
@Maximum-Dev: Sorry to have contributed to thread derailment. I totally agree, whatever the refund policy, marketplace staff not having knowledge of the engine and how assets are made and used is one of many serious issues.
Unfortunately that is not the case, it was edited because it did have private correspondence which isn’t allowed and will be removed regardless of it’s context in any/all posts. Even if the user posted it publicly to thank an Epic staff member or moderator, it would still be removed. It’s nothing personal, and we’re not trying to hide anything from anyone. You’re still free to discuss the policy and express your concerns, it just can’t include any private discussions and/or identifying information.
Epic will be posting to address the concerns you have all brought up soon. Until then please continue to keep this thread on topic (not that it hasn’t been recently, just keep it up).
I saw the information that was redacted, there was no personally identifiable information. He just listed the reasons relayed to him by the staff that the buyer cited as grounds for a refund. How can we have an honest discussion about this if he isn’t even allowed to provide the reasons this is happening?
