No Man’s Sky became yet another game on the long list of games that over-promised and under-delivered. Features like interactions with other players were promised but not implemented in the game, so it’s no wonder that players were upset. Thankfully, companies such as Valve and Amazon were quick to offer refunds to those dissatisfied with the game.
Surprisingly, Sony also decided to refund players. This is abnormal because Sony has a strict refund policy regarding players being able to refund games after they’ve already played it. However, in a gesture of ‘goodwill’ Sony decided to allow players to request a refund in this one instance.
This should be the conclusion to a story of players being sold a game with missing features, both big and small. A game developer makes promises and breaks them, players lose out, the sellers of the game offer refunds to those that request them. All’s well and good. Except it’s not.
Recent allegations on the NeoGAF forums reveal that players that have taken Sony up on their offer are now not able to access the support features like the PSN support chat. It appears that only users that requested the refund are blocked from their services. When users made new IDs, they found that they were unblocked and could again access them.
One user, by the user name Admiral Woofington, was trying to request a cancellation on a pre-order but was unable to access their chat system. After deciding to call their support line and waiting 30 minutes to talk to a representative, they allegedly were told that because they had received a refund on No Man’s Sky, they were unable to refund any other products. Despite a clear difference between a refund and a cancellation of a pre-order, the representative did not carry through with the cancellation because they can’t do more than one refund but instead raised the ticket for further review.
Is this a case of a software glitch or perhaps internal miscommunication? I sincerely hope so. Until more information is made clear, it is best to keep an open mind.