GOG’s refund policy has always had a month-long breathing room, but there were strict caveats. You’d usually only get your money back if a game hadn’t yet been downloaded or played. A sort of “oh, I didn’t really want that” option for salvaging impulse purchases. Special consideration would be taken if a purchase had technical issues, but ’til now, you’d usually be stuck with a game once you downloaded it - whether you liked it or not. This week, GOG announced that it was kicking the doors to refunds wide open, whether you’ve downloaded a game or not. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings More details – https://t.co/WfwZkyLkbo — GOG.COM (@GOGcom) February 26, 2020 This new approach is staggeringly generous, even by the standards of GOG’s competitors. On Steam, you’ve got 14 days to decide whether you’re sticking with a purchase, as long as you don’t plug more than 2 hours into the game. It’s the same deal over on the Epic Games Store. But with GOG, you’ve now got a whole 30 days to make up your mind, and it doesn’t even look like there’s a hard limit on playtime. If you are that person (really, don’t be), GOG reserves the right to say no to refund requests. Still, 30 days is a long time. Long enough that you could beat all but the longest RPG sprawls and still potentially get away with a refund. There’s a more troubling side to GOG’s policy, mind. See, the store’s big selling point is that, unlike Steam or Origin or that, none of the games it sells contain DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions of any kind. You shouldn’t ever have to check in with a server or launcher to verify ownership before firing up a game. Good stuff, right? But it throws a strange wrench into this refund policy. Right now, it’s unclear what’s stopping someone from downloading a game and backing up the installer (or the game files entirely) on another drive before getting a refund. Responding to a concerned comment on their original Twitter post, GOG explained that they’re counting on their customers to just, like, be cool about it. “This update was possible thanks to our community’s respect for all the time and hard work put into creating the games you buy on GOG.com and playing by the rules. We can only hope and encourage users to continue to do so.” Time will tell if that faith holds out.
