Failure — Dark Matter

Yesterday I wrote about the GOG sales they had going on. For a while they had one game up for sale which just came out called Dark Matter. This was a game that was put on Kickstarter in the hopes of raising enough money to pay the development team. The team, unfortunately did not make their goal. They were not funded and as a result had a difficult task to resolve. They did not resolve this difficult task of scrapping the game or putting it on hiatus.

Instead InterWave Studios decided it would be a better idea to make a game half as long and abruptly end the campagin with a black screen and white text. The game is not early access or beta as such an ending may inspire you to think. Due to lack of funding this company has decided it would be best to secretly develop a shorter game with no ending and try to make some money off what they could.


                            

Video footage thanks to, Jay Xan

Currently GOG is offering refunds for anyone who bought the game. People who made the unfortunate mistake of buying the game on Steam are even more screwed over. Steam has a very anti-consumer policy of not wanting to give refunds for games because they don't sell you anything you can actually give back unlike old fashioned stores like EB Games or Gamestop.

In a post made by GOG officials on the their forms wrote,

"All;

It's come to our attention that the gamecard for Dark Matter was not quite specific enough about the nature of the game and, as a result, it may be that some people bought the title with some misapprehensions as to how the game's story would end. Since we don't ever want to sell a game to someone because they believe it is something that it is not, we wanted to let you know about this and let you know what we're doing to make it right.

If you bought Dark Matter before 21 October 2013 at 15:00 GMT (when we updated the description to where we feel it adequately reflects the game) and you feel that the game wasn't as promised to you, please contact Support and they'll be happy to offer you full refund to your card or, if you''d prefer, games of equal or lesser value to the sale price of Dark Matter (which is $13.49).

We're sorry if anyone who bought the game isn't happy with the way it was represented, and we hope this makes it right for you guys.

If you've got any questions, hit me up and I'll try to answer 'em for you."

A shame since many people were supporting the game in development and wanted to see it succeed. For the company to go around and pull a move like this pretty much tarnishes every member of the development team.

This incident also really begs the question how much responsibility do the retailers have for selling bad products? Steam really doesn't have that many games published per day (new games especially).
The reason they don't play through their releases before hand is due to the uninformed loyal fan base who trusts Valve and everything they do. Buying based off metacritic scores instead of trusted sources giving

reviews. Consumers need to take a step back and really understand they know what they are buying but for a brand new release indie title with no covered of the final product? There is really no one after the developer to blame other than the retailer you supplied the defective product.

Steam and GOG are liable. They should have a system in place to stop these events from happening. Though I will give GOG some credit for refunding you as any retailer would. Though don't expect that same treatment from Steam.