Changes to the Consumer Rights Act have come into effect in the UK today, and with key amendments designed to deal with software purchases and digital goods, there are some important gains for gamers.
Most obvious is the provision of a clear 30-day period in which consumers can return goods that they deem to be faulty, and ask for a refund or a replacement. In the past, the act ambiguously required that goods needed to be returned within a “reasonable time”, which allowed more wriggle room for retailers, who could also insist on just offering a repair.
The act makes clear that goods must be fit for purpose and “free from minor defects”. With an increasing number of major games now being released with significant technical issues – including the likes of Battlefield 4, SimCity and the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight – consumers will now be in a much stronger position to request a refund from the supplier of the game if it won’t load or can’t access online features.
“The reasonable time has been clarified, which is good,” says Alex Tutty of entertainment law firm, Sheridans. “Retailers previously relied on this – especially if you think about a game that can be completed in 10 hours; they would say ‘you can’t return this after 20 days’.”
The act applies, not just to physical boxed game releases from online or highstreet stores, but to digital games purchased from online sites like Steam, Origin, or the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network stores. Most of these have refund policies in place, but the new act makes their specific responsibilities much clearer. Titles will have to match the descriptions given on the website and be fit for the indicated purpose.
“The update clarifies that the sale of goods act will now apply to digital products,” says Tutty. “Previously you had more rights if you bought a game on disc, now you get the benefit of that even if you’re buying digitally. From 1 October, anything you download has to be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and meet the description that’s given. If you download a game and it’s bug-ridden, you can demand a refund and quote the sale of goods act. Before this, it wasn’t especially clear cut.”
The act also covers free-to-download games. There is obviously no refund potential on the title itself but virtual goods, such as customised characters or new maps and levels, will be covered by the act and users will be able to demand refunds on unsatisfactory in-game purchases.
Early releases and day one disasters
The new ruling also allows for the growing number of titles now released in unfinished or “beta” form, through services like Steam Early Access. “If you do indicate to people that the game is going to be buggy, that is allowed,” says Tutty. “But the act will allow people to get a refund on games that are released as full titles, yet are filled with bugs and don’t work.”
So how will this affect those big day one releases, especially multiplayer games, where players want to get online and start levelling up their characters as soon as possible – but find that the code is broken or the servers have collapsed? “There are two remedies under the act,” says Tutty. “The right to repair or replacement, or the right to a price reduction up to a full refund if a repair or replacement is not possible within a reasonable time. So a company could possibly say, ‘well, we’ve got a patch coming that will fix it pretty quickly’. That’s a repair.”
“However, where it gets quite interesting is that lots of people really want to play on day one – that’s a key selling point, especially when you get these exclusive deals where a certain map pack may be available first on a specific platform – well, presumably you’ve bought that game because you want to play it online, on day one, against your mates.”
Pre-orders have become a contentious area of the games industry, with a greater number of publishers and retailers looking to get players to commit to a purchase before the final release. Tutty believes that the new act may mean that these customers find they have more power to ask for a refund if the final game doesn’t live up to early promises given on the pre-order page.
He explains: “If the company says, this is how the game is going to work, and later they pivot and say, actually it will be slightly different, players could complain that, well I bought it under the belief it was going to be something else, so I want a refund.”
So could the changes to the consumer act – which only applies in Britain – lead to any significant changes in how major games get released? It’s possible. Although the UK is only one market, games revenue was £4bn last year, making it second only to Germany in the European sector. Britain also boasts a large development community and is home to some of the most highly subscribed, vocal and influential YouTubers. “If I was a games publisher I would be more mindful now of releasing buggy products,” says Tutty. “I think the quality assurance process is really going to have to ramp back up. It should make things better.”
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Why only Nintendo understands handheld gaming
At the EGX video games festival in Birmingham, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, took to the stage and essentially confirmed that there will not be a follow-up to the PlayStation Vita handheld console. “The climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming,” he lamented.
But is this true?
When the smartphone started its inexorable rise as a gaming platform, thanks mostly to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, business pundits were leaping over each other to declare the imminent death of the specialist games console. Why would people pay hundreds of pounds for a dedicated games machine if they were effectively carrying one around in their pockets all day? And then the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived, shifting tens of millions of units, selling faster than their predecessors and generally doing okay.
As for the handheld gaming sector, the area of gaming surely most at risk from mobile phones ... well, the Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 50m units, putting it within a whisker of the top ten best-selling games platforms of all time. It hasn’t done as well as the Nintendo DS, of course (150m sales), but then, the DS has been on sale for over a decade and the 3DS has only been out for four years – and it arrived in a very different, much more fragmented and diverse, market place. Unlike Vita, however, it ignored most of its competition – from internet-connected consoles, to smartphones and tablets – and did its own thing.
Doing its own thing is something Nintendo has always understood, and why it has utterly dominated the handheld gaming sector. There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.
The Game & Watch games were super simple, based on very cheap LCD screens, but they looked lovely, they were sturdy and they were cheap. When the GameBoy arrived in 1989, its monochrome display looked out of step with the wondrous visuals of the 16bit console era, but again, the tech was inexpensive and sturdy, and the games (Tetris, Super Mario Land, et al) exploited the limitations in an entirely loveable way. The combination of portability and kawaii design sensibilities meant that people actively enjoyed taking these things around with them and showing them to others.
Nintendo knew almost instinctively that we would think of miniature games as endearing. There is just something about the reduced form factor that allows us to enjoy child-like experiences without feeling self-conscious. The industrial design legend Donald Norman talks about how humans project a series of expectations onto objects, and how designers need to understand these in order to make successful products. In short: we kind of want small things to be cute – and Nintendo gets that.
But Nintendo’s rivals have usually made the error of thinking that to compete with Nintendo they had to beat it in terms of technology. The Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai Wonderswan totally understood the appeal of cuteness, but they were largely restricted to the Japanese market. In terms of global competitors – from the Sega Game Gear, through the Atari Lynx to the PlayStation Portable and Vita – the philosophy has been “bringing the home console experience to your pocket”. Not only has that proved costly to the consumer in terms of retail price and battery life, it grates against what a lot of people want from a portable experience.
Sometimes, as a race, we allow ourselves to be loveable. It doesn’t happen much and we often have to express it in quite obtuse ways – through novelty socks, or action figure collections, or really liking Pixar movies. Portable games fit into this mode of thinking. The most successful handheld franchises – Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton – they’re all reasonably complex experiences, but they’re also really, really cute. They fit the form factor – both physically and psychologically.
The PlayStation Portable wasn’t cute. Vita isn’t cute. Both tried to compete, in industrial design terms, with home consoles and with smartphones, dropping into an awkward aesthetic space between the two. When gamers first saw Ridge Racer on the Sony PSP they gasped in wonder – a true console experience on the go – but it turned out that not many people wanted that; not just because PSP was more expensive, but because (to a lot of people) it just felt weird to sit on a bus with this ostentatious piece of cold, sleek gaming technology.
The idea of the Vita as a mini PlayStation 3 or 4 has stifled the creativity of developers. Stunted compromised spin-offs of major console titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty have done very little except underline the differences between a home machine and a portable gadget. They didn’t work. It’s no coincidence that the most successful series on Sony’s handheld machines – Monster Hunter – is very much in the Nintendo mould of highly sociable titles with childlike collection systems.
Sony has tried to innovate in hardware terms with OLED screens, proprietary memory card formats, proprietary optical discs and strange touch pads underneath the display. But these have usually been ignored by developers and read by consumers as a way to gouge more money from them. The philosophy of the home console race cannot be applied to the portable market because the consumer mindset is totally different. Sony may have had more success if it had really, really pushed the product as a homebase for offbeat experiments and indie projects – there have certainly been plenty of those along the way. But the marketing attention was often elsewhere.
The GameBoy, the DS and the 3DS haven’t just dominated this sector because they got the basics right – battery life, cost and sturdiness – they dominated because Nintendo understands that small things are cute and that cuteness pervades the whole experience. This is exactly what’s going on in the smartphone sector with Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Bringing a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer into work or school is a very specific experience that has nothing to do with technology or gadgetry.
But is this true?
When the smartphone started its inexorable rise as a gaming platform, thanks mostly to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, business pundits were leaping over each other to declare the imminent death of the specialist games console. Why would people pay hundreds of pounds for a dedicated games machine if they were effectively carrying one around in their pockets all day? And then the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived, shifting tens of millions of units, selling faster than their predecessors and generally doing okay.
As for the handheld gaming sector, the area of gaming surely most at risk from mobile phones ... well, the Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 50m units, putting it within a whisker of the top ten best-selling games platforms of all time. It hasn’t done as well as the Nintendo DS, of course (150m sales), but then, the DS has been on sale for over a decade and the 3DS has only been out for four years – and it arrived in a very different, much more fragmented and diverse, market place. Unlike Vita, however, it ignored most of its competition – from internet-connected consoles, to smartphones and tablets – and did its own thing.
Doing its own thing is something Nintendo has always understood, and why it has utterly dominated the handheld gaming sector. There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.
The Game & Watch games were super simple, based on very cheap LCD screens, but they looked lovely, they were sturdy and they were cheap. When the GameBoy arrived in 1989, its monochrome display looked out of step with the wondrous visuals of the 16bit console era, but again, the tech was inexpensive and sturdy, and the games (Tetris, Super Mario Land, et al) exploited the limitations in an entirely loveable way. The combination of portability and kawaii design sensibilities meant that people actively enjoyed taking these things around with them and showing them to others.
Nintendo knew almost instinctively that we would think of miniature games as endearing. There is just something about the reduced form factor that allows us to enjoy child-like experiences without feeling self-conscious. The industrial design legend Donald Norman talks about how humans project a series of expectations onto objects, and how designers need to understand these in order to make successful products. In short: we kind of want small things to be cute – and Nintendo gets that.
But Nintendo’s rivals have usually made the error of thinking that to compete with Nintendo they had to beat it in terms of technology. The Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai Wonderswan totally understood the appeal of cuteness, but they were largely restricted to the Japanese market. In terms of global competitors – from the Sega Game Gear, through the Atari Lynx to the PlayStation Portable and Vita – the philosophy has been “bringing the home console experience to your pocket”. Not only has that proved costly to the consumer in terms of retail price and battery life, it grates against what a lot of people want from a portable experience.
Sometimes, as a race, we allow ourselves to be loveable. It doesn’t happen much and we often have to express it in quite obtuse ways – through novelty socks, or action figure collections, or really liking Pixar movies. Portable games fit into this mode of thinking. The most successful handheld franchises – Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton – they’re all reasonably complex experiences, but they’re also really, really cute. They fit the form factor – both physically and psychologically.
The PlayStation Portable wasn’t cute. Vita isn’t cute. Both tried to compete, in industrial design terms, with home consoles and with smartphones, dropping into an awkward aesthetic space between the two. When gamers first saw Ridge Racer on the Sony PSP they gasped in wonder – a true console experience on the go – but it turned out that not many people wanted that; not just because PSP was more expensive, but because (to a lot of people) it just felt weird to sit on a bus with this ostentatious piece of cold, sleek gaming technology.
The idea of the Vita as a mini PlayStation 3 or 4 has stifled the creativity of developers. Stunted compromised spin-offs of major console titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty have done very little except underline the differences between a home machine and a portable gadget. They didn’t work. It’s no coincidence that the most successful series on Sony’s handheld machines – Monster Hunter – is very much in the Nintendo mould of highly sociable titles with childlike collection systems.
Sony has tried to innovate in hardware terms with OLED screens, proprietary memory card formats, proprietary optical discs and strange touch pads underneath the display. But these have usually been ignored by developers and read by consumers as a way to gouge more money from them. The philosophy of the home console race cannot be applied to the portable market because the consumer mindset is totally different. Sony may have had more success if it had really, really pushed the product as a homebase for offbeat experiments and indie projects – there have certainly been plenty of those along the way. But the marketing attention was often elsewhere.
The GameBoy, the DS and the 3DS haven’t just dominated this sector because they got the basics right – battery life, cost and sturdiness – they dominated because Nintendo understands that small things are cute and that cuteness pervades the whole experience. This is exactly what’s going on in the smartphone sector with Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Bringing a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer into work or school is a very specific experience that has nothing to do with technology or gadgetry.
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