No Man's Sky has seen a rough week. On top of news regarding stagnating sales for the game on Steam, a lot of customers being upset about launch bugs and Hello Games' Sean Murray flip-flopping on paid DLC, the hyped space survival sandbox game is now seeing problems with a number of PlayStation 4 customers.
According to this article from Eurogamer.net, customers who have purchased No Man's Sky using the online store through the PS4 are seeing issues in trying to refund their digital purchase and get their money back from Sony.
While physical games have a more lenient refund policy than digital games (edit: As pointed out by Silver King in the comments, physical games in fact do not have that much more of a lenient refund policy than digital games), Sony's refund policy seems to be anything but lenient.
According to the finer details of the refund policy, if you have purchased a game digitally, you have 14 days to cancel and get a refund. However, if you start downloading or streaming the game, you won't be able to get your money back. The only way you can get a refund after you've started downloading or streaming is if "the content is faulty."
What constitutes "faulty content"? As Eurogamer points out, many No Man's Sky PlayStation 4 customers have experienced in-game crashes and motion sickness. However, even in light of these content-based issues, Sony has still refused to issue refunds to these customers.
Instead, representatives for the company have begun urging customers to direct their complaints to the developer. On top of that, the support reps have also confused several customers.
One of the customers quoted in the Eurogamer article relates a very jarring experience with a PlayStation customer support rep who told him that even if he did receive a refund for No Man's Sky, his PlayStation 4 would not run a physical or digital copy afterwards.
According to the rep, the system would delete the license from the man's account and block any future attempts to add one. However, further down in the article, the author relates how the refund policy language seems to say the opposite and that even if a refund is issued for a particular game, that game will still be playable later on down the road.
The confusing language of Sony's refund policy stands in stark contrast to the Steam refund policy, which allows for a no-questions-asked refund either 14 days after a digital purchase or before 2 hours of gameplay have been completed.
This could cause issues for Sony, in places like the European Union and Australia, much like it did for Valve regarding Steam due to consumer protection laws.
What do you think? Is Sony's refund policy fair or does it need to be rewritten? Do you think the EU or Australia could be legal action? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
