Some Australians CAN Have a Refund for Fallout 76

Source https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/zenimax-to-refund-consumers-for-the-fallout-76-game?fbclid=IwAR3EYotW1ajN1j-ZO5mgSFxlNKs2UTrJ2gjCAWrsN9JKZoVranUropOkseg and see the Reddit discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/dpy1gc/australian_court_rules_that_some_customers_are/

I’ll quickly copy and paste my response to the news that I posted in that thread and post more about why I’ve reached the end of the road with FO76 later this week.

“This is IMPORTANT. The last pre-order disappointment I was involved in was No Man’s Sky but looking back FO76 was a much bigger let-down and at more cost in both money and time.

I requested a refund on NMS but had played the game for more than 2 hours so was ineligible under Steam’s rules. I went on to play the game for 30 hours and at less than £1 per hour had a reasonable time with it. The updates have made it much better and Hello Games are a tiny indie company that have turned the game around.

I may seem like a hypocrite as I clocked up over 2,000 hours on FO76 and could have stopped earlier but you know, the old ‘sunk cost fallacy’ kept me coming back. That and the friends I made in the game.

For those of you hanging on in there you are probably realising it is a case of diminishing returns. I have friends who have played WoW for ever and I always wondered what kept them playing. It was a depth of content and the community. It’s not for me, I hated the “kill x creatures” quests and spent only 600 hours on it. Still I considered my time spent in Azeroth as worth the money. Besides, it actually worked even with mid 2000s internet flakiness.

That a country like Oz has won a small victory for the consumer is an important landmark: these things happen rarely but are watershed moments.

At various stages of my 2K+ hours of play I was behind, then against and now behind the complainers. Like a proper game reviewer you need to ask someone who has been through the full cycle of joy and despair before diving into a commitment like FO76. Up until patch 9 or so I would have said to anyone asking for my recommendation to buy the game. BGS’s shenanigans and me getting bored with the game mean I would not do so now with the caveat though that I did have some good times in Appalachia.

It’s evident to everyone paid shills included that the game is beyond repair and in fact BGS knew from the start it would never evolve into something remotely “finished”. The game has been in beta for a over year if you ask me. It’s like the Steam Early Access scam but on a grander scale.

So I’ve left the game (tons of shit over 9 accounts left to give away if I ever log on again) and can’t foresee a time when I’d happily launch into that world with its buggy, diluted gameplay except to chat with those few friends again who I have on Discord anyway.

No other game has left me with this feeling after so many hours. I suspect nostalgia might kick in in a few years but by then lord only knows what state this game will be in if it still exists.

I’m an older games player and I think there were two peaks of video games: in the arcades, mid to late 80s and sometime around 2010 for home video games. Before micro-transactions and log in for daily action points kind of shit took hold.

But hey, if you have a PC and an internet connection you have access to decades of good games, a lot of it free or almost free. And there’s always indie games which may well turn out to be the salvation of this hobby we love.

/rant”