Purchase And Refund

On Thursday, BioWare gave a promotion to all players of their MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. The promotion is that if you are a subscriber of the game on 12 Sep, Bioware would give the first (and thus far only) expansion of the game, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, to you for free.

What if you already owned the expansion? Well for such players, Bioware announced that these subscribers will receive 1050 Cartel Coins. The Cartel Coins are credits used in the game cash shop and 1050 Cartel Coins roughly equal in value to the price of the expansion. Basically, players who already have the expansion are getting a refund.

Maybe it’s because I never bought Rise of the Hutt Cartel; I thought this promotion by Bioware to be extremely fair. If you don’t have the Rise of the Hutt Cartel, you get it for free. If you bought it, you get a refund. I thought this to be amazingly, shockingly fair.

Not accordingly to some players who already own the Rise of the Hutt Cartel! Some of these players are complaining about this deal on the Bioware forum because…well, I’m not actually sure why!

Bioware is giving the expansion free to players who don’t own it, and is giving a refund to players who do. For players who feel shortchange on this due to the fact they already own the expansion; sorry but I don’t see why you should feel this way because it’s up to Bioware to decide on whether they should compensate you. I mean if Bioware don’t offer a refund, who can blame them?

If you go into a shop and buy something today, you pay for the product at the price it is currently. If the same product goes on sale tomorrow, say 50%, can you go back to the shop and ask for 50% refund? Yes, but most shop would say “no” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You already agreed to the price for the product when you bought it. You can’t go back and ask for a refund just because the price of the same product goes down in the near future.  You may feel it’s unfair but you are the one who made the deal to buy the product at the agreed price in the first place. The seller is under no obligation to refund you.

Bioware did! They offered a refund on their product to people who had already bought it. That’s incredible and they should be applauded for it. People who think Bioware giving away the Rise of the Hutt Cartel for free is unfair, well that’s too bad. The game and the expansion belongs to BioWare, they can give it to whoever they want. Just be glad they are giving you a refund for it. Most companies would not.