Game is still $60 AUD, who on earth would even pay that for a poor man's persona. I wouldn't pay that even for Persona 5 if it came to PC.

You're missing the point. This is a case where 100% of the people who bought the game did so within the month prior to the game going on discount. This isn't a case where a small fraction of the customers here paid for a game and then saw a discount shortly thereafter.

And there are ways around this, but yes, at some point somebody is going to just miss the cutoff.

Thanks, so the answer here is effectively to not buy from that publisher until the game has already been discounted,.

Seems rather shortsighted of the person who made the call, but if that's how they're going to do it, I'm guessing that anybody who was bit by this is going to be wary.

I was rather upset at this as well, although I think calling it a scam and demanding a refund is a bit much. It does mean that even if I'm feeling in a weird mood again, I will not buy any games any more at full price for quite some time. Especially since this game doesn't even work for me on wine, so it's just a full-price waste of disk space. In short, because this game went on sale, I decided not to get Pathway.

It's never up to the publisher alone. If players hadn't just taken what was clearly a worse deal right away ten years ago, physical would still be around even on the PC. Sadly, consumers nowadays couldn't care less about good and bad deals and instead just keep up with the joneses by buying the newest thing on the newest platform.

But yeah of course you are right, in 2019 you got no option. That's what happens when players just buy buy buy without regard for anything - everyone gets screwed and now has to even say 'thanks' to the publisher. Should have waited until digital goods were regulated the same physical ones are, which still isn't the case a dozen years later.

To anyone asking why I used the word SCAM, notice that's it's only in the title. The name of the game is when posting something in the Internet is "Draw Attention". Do I really feel that it's a scam, no, do I feel that it's a bad business on the publisher's part, yes (see the amount of people upset when they purchased Fallout 76 at full price with the game getting discounted a few week later).

@Ashleee,: Thank you again for the great service. As I stated in my correspondence with you and in this topic, there's a reason why retail stores will give this sort of policy. Unless we are talking about a rare case scenario like what happen with this game, for the rest of the time, when a customer will request a difference refund within 30 days of purchase in order to get the discount, the store will agree in order to:

a) Not to have to deal with a return when you know the customer will just pick-up one that's on discount since it's would cost you more time and money if he did so.

b) Not to piss-off customers and risk losing them, especially when this would probably affect only a few of them since the odds of having a lot of people buying X product and having all of them finding out or caring about the refund would be slim.

And I thought that you'd call this clickbait and people don't like this. Then again I am old and probably don't understand this internet thingy well enough ;)

Lesson learned, that's for certain.

Also, thanks to Ashlee for clarifying the situation: I must say that I felt bad for asking for a full refund for an almost 50€ game (although I'd just buy it back at discounted price and spend the rest on something else) so that's why I opted to ask merely for the difference. I was not aware of the technical impossibilities of such thing.

I"ve learned that lesson in the past here as well. I still buy, but I tend to wait until the last minute to do so or when there's a significant deal.

Doing things like this just makes it harder to sell in the future and conditions buyers to wait for a sale. If they can't hold out for at least a couple months before offering it at a lower price, then they screwed up on the marketing or pricing of the game and this is likely to cost a lot of money in the future.

If you buy a game on launch, you know it's going to be cheaper later. A digital game is (almost) always at it's highest price on launch. What does it matter if the inevitable discount sale or price drop happened a day, a week, a month or a year later?

...and/or they chose to treat GOG customers unequally, like second-class citizens, by not bothering to give them features that their Steam customers do receive for the same identical game, i.e. Achievements, which Caligula has on Steam but not on GOG.

When potential customers like me see that happening, then those devs/publishers have convinced me not to buy their games (unless maybe they are discounted for 85+% off) even though in many cases, I would have bought them at a normal price, had they chosen to do the right thing by treating GOG customers equally to other customers.



Update: Was contacted again a while ago and support offered a feasible alternative. Issue has been solved admirably, thanks a lot!

This renders previous posts mostly invalid on the refund issue.

Happy it turned out fine for you as well.