>The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.
But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.
I'm sure people will come out of the woodwork to tell me just how wrong this is, but say various Linux projects or the kernel seem to have better (better, not perfect) governance structures.
Not being obsessed with rapacious growth, not chasing trends and features that look good on delivery metrics but instead building a stable product would go a long way.
And frankly, for descriptions on what the product should be, standards to implement (or not), and overall strategy for a project that tries to do its best for tech as a whole - Mozillas own writeups are spot-on! They just don't seem to act in accordance with the "vibe" and ideals that blog posts etc. talk about.
There is still the conspiracy theory that Mozilla is mostly a sock puppet by Google by now, mostly kept alive so Google can say that Chrome is not a monopoly.
Behavior like this doesn't do a lot to dispel that theory.
Bethesda games have the same ecosystem - they do provide an official plugin system, but since modders aren't content with the restrictions of that system, they reverse engineered the game(s, this has been going on since Oblivion) and made a script extender that hacks the game in-memory to inject scripts (hence the name).
> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game,
Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction.
I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy and lack of restrictions. Which is an indirect call out at Steam, which hasn't cared in the slightest and continues to have a worse policy.
I don't know if this has changed since the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software at a retail store, but the return policy on games and software was always that they couldn't be returned once opened, at least at the bigbox retailers in the US. I'm sure stores occasionally made exceptions, but I very clearly remember buying a copy of Oblivion and not being able to install it due to minimum specs and the store not accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
Standard policy is I think mostly the same, but in Europe there's been arguments that those policies don't follow the actual consumer protection laws, which is a whole thing that I don't think really resolved one way or another.
It varies with country but I believe a number of protection laws specify normal use/testing a product is allowed, so you can open boxes and test functionality (norwegian law does this for sure). Excepting videogames from this is arbitrary, the argument from consumer protection agencies goes.
I believe in practice a number of games did get refunded when threatened with formal complaints along these lines, but that's far from a guaranteed thing.
Anyway, GOG decided to go with the generous interpretation (and the one all kinds of electronic goods except games and CDs/DVDs have), which is nicer for everyone, really
> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)
Huh, we have different laws and physical stores. Here, no store will take your game back if you opened the box. Maybe that changed, but in the past any game opened couldn't be returned because you could have either copied the disk, or copied to key and activated it.
I believe there were some pushes to get rid of opened box = no refund policies as being against standard 14-day returns in Norway, because the law explicitly says the consumer may (paraphrase) "reasonably test the use of a product" which allows you to open the box on other goods. But keys being consumable puts them in another category of goods (like food, which obviously can't be returned after "use"), so that doesn't apply.
2 hour return policy can already be a problem for a very short indie game. There was one which you could beat in 2 hours and refund and people did that.
GOG gets away with their policy because only people who believe in GOG ideallogy go there, and they won't refund a good game. If steam did that, abuse would skyrocket.
And in my country, unless explicitly stated otherwise, most physical goods can't be returned if they are used.
In some sense, GOGs entire existence is testing the hypothesis that it's impossible to run a consumer friendly digital store due to abuse.
If you took the common sense publisher view then no DRM = everything you make is instantly pirated and the whole store fails instantly. But GOG is a viable storefront, so that's demonstrably wrong.
The evidence is no better for Steam's refund policy than it was for DRM being necessary.
It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many people are abusing the refund system because going through those steps is more work than piracy.
sadly they don't do regional pricing at all, so steam price is almost half the GoG and maybe even lower. But yeah if you can buy GoG, it's better due to no DRM
But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.
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