Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> For technical reasons, we cannot divide a game pack (for instance, a season pass, a pack containing the base game and its DLCs, or a pack containing a whole series of games). As a result, you would get a refund for the full pack and, as a consequence, the full pack will be removed from your account. If you apply for a refund for a DLC, and it was not purchased as a pack (bundled with the base game), we can issue a refund for the DLC itself. If you refund the base game, but also purchased DLCs separately, we would also refund the DLCs linked to that base game.

(from the FAQ page for the new policy, https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006129837?produ... )

I'm intrigued by the internals here. GOG does indeed sell some things both bundled and individually, like the "Hollow Knight + Soundtracks" bundle compared to "Hollow Knight (no soundtracks)" / "Hollow Knight Official Soundtrack" / "Hollow Knight Gods & Nightmares DLC Soundtrack".

It is not obvious to me why an account that purchased the bundle should be treated differently from an account that purchased the three individual offerings. (Well, in this case, the bundle is cheaper, but that's not always true.)

Amazon has this problem too. If you buy an mp3 from them, they'll discount the cost of the digital album that mp3 was technically offered from. If that album exists as multiple SKUs, only one SKU will see the discount. Be careful! And Kindle MatchBook will likewise only match if the editions of the ebook currently offered and the physical book you purchased coincide. Was a new edition released with a new foreword? You need to buy another paper copy if you want to be re-eligible for MatchBook. Even if there's only one ebook offering, for the current edition -- even if the old version of the ebook is automatically updated to the new version -- your old purchase stops qualifying you for MatchBook when the new edition comes out.

> It is not obvious to me why an account that purchased the bundle should be treated differently from an account that purchased the three individual offerings

Let's say 3 SKUs exist: one for $10 and 2 for $15

Now add a bundle that offers all three for $30.

If someone with the bundle wants a refund on the item that is normally $10, what do you do that ISN'T different from someone that bought them each individually?

Or am I misunderstanding your confusion?

GOG already offers this exact functionality, two different ways:

1. Add a fourth SKU. There are no files associated with this new SKU, but if you own it, you can download the files associated with the first three SKUs.

2. When you pay for the products, if all three SKUs are in your shopping cart[1], you get a 25% discount. Otherwise you pay full price.

If I'm reading you right, you're saying that if you bought bundle #2, then refunding the $10 item should obviously get you $7.50 -- because that's what you paid for it when you bought it -- but there's just no way of determining how to refund the same $10 item from bundle #1, even though bundle #1 and bundle #2 do not differ in any way at all.

(In fact, GOG bundles usually price the last item negatively -- it is cheaper to buy the whole bundle than it would be to buy all-but-one of the bundled items. These are still all formally individual purchases covered by the return policy, and I feel pretty confident they're not going to refund you a negative amount if you return an item you bought in one of these individual-purchases-with-discount bundles.)

[1] Technical note that doesn't affect the discussion: if you already own an item, it counts as being in your shopping cart for purposes of bundle discounts.

> If I'm reading you right

No - I was saying the same thing you are: the items of the bundle CANNOT be mapped individually, which is why GOG has this policy. The poster I was replying to was saying they didn't understand why a bundle was treated differently, and I was trying to say why. (apparently, poorly)

> I was saying the same thing you are: the items of the bundle CANNOT be mapped individually

I wasn't saying this, because it isn't true. Bundled items are usually processed as a set of simultaneous individual purchases, with a discount applied to each of them.

What do you think of bundle #1 and bundle #2? How would you expect refunds to be processed in either case?

It may also be a limitation of what's easy to do with their payment processor.

As someone who accepts purchases online, my payment provider gives me a lovely dashboard of all transactions, and on each transaction there's a nice and easy "refund this transaction" button for me to click. I'm happy to click this button for you, in particular because it also refunds me of the transaction fee so refunding you is essentially "free" (with the exception that I don't get the money from the sale, of course).

Refunding partial transactions is a whole can of worms. A small list of questions that you would need to answer are:

* How much do I refund you? How do fees and taxes figure into this?

* If I sell you a bundle that includes the thing you want to return, but that thing was also on sale separately (possibly at different rates in different bundles), what do I do?

* How much of the transaction fees will my payment processor refund to me?

Not to say that these questions don't have answers, and possibly favorable ones. Just that it's a lot more complicated than just saying "either I click the refund button or I don't".

> It is not obvious to me why an account that purchased the bundle should be treated differently from an account that purchased the three individual offerings. (Well, in this case, the bundle is cheaper, but that's not always true.)

It sounds like they've just chosen not to deal with the complexity of refunding parts of bundles. It's not a question of whether they should, just a question of whether they wanted to spend the time and energy.

The part where it's not obvious how to price individual offerings in a discounted bundle for refund purposes is precisely the problem, and simply saying "we're not breaking up bundles" is one valid way to get around the problem, whether or not it's the consumer's most preferred way.

> The part where it's not obvious how to price individual offerings in a discounted bundle for refund purposes is precisely the problem

Well, GOG also does regular bundles. "Hollow Knight and Soundtracks" is a single SKU that just so happens to entitle you to the same content as three other SKUs (while making search results more confusing). But more normal bundles are common. It's very frequent for them to offer a significant discount when you buy several different SKUs simultaneously. Those show up as individual purchases -- the bundling is just that they were in your cart at the same time, and you got a discount -- and I feel pretty safe assuming that GOG will actually treat them as individual purchases when refunding them.

But obviously, the same algorithm that calculates the individual price of a single-SKU-included-in-a-multi-SKU-bundle will work just as well on part-of-an-SKU-that-just-so-happens-to-match-some-other-SKU.

I had an issue on Steam during their Lunar New Year sale, where I accidentally purchased the wrong "bundle" (there were two, one was missing one or two items).

Unfortunately, I couldn't refund the bundle; I had to go through the process of submitting for a refund of every item in the bundle (I think eight or ten items), with an explanation of "oops, wrong bundle").

Unfortunately, while both bundles were on sale, the items missing from the bundle I'd purchased were more expensive to buy individually than the entire bundle cost, and there was no 'upgrade" from one bundle to the next with discount for already purchased items.

I get that this is all a complicated dance between Steam, users, and publishers, but it seems as though this kind of situation is worse for everyone involved, and discourages spending more on that $30 DLC, when the bundle that it comes in is $5 more than the bundle you purchased.

Could easily be contractual with game publiasher. "You can sell this bundle for X dollars. You can not split the bundle up for individual sale".

I'm sure they don't want to argue over in court whether refunding half of a 2 part bundle counts as individual sale. Or, the bundle contract could easily out law partial refunds.

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