GOG.com feels however that gamers were misled enough to warrant refunds from their store, providing Dark Matter was bought before they updated its gamecard on the site.
After roughly five hours of gameplay the player enters a room only to find themselves hit with a small wall of text telling them the game is now over.
Evidence has surfaced that the released version of Dark Matter looks an awful lot like a ‘closed alpha’ build that was around four months prior, where the ending claims they’ve finished the first two chapters of the game with another two to follow. Publisher Iceberg Interactive claims it’s to become an episodic series.
When Dark Matter failed in its Kickstarter bid, ”…the idea was then formed to make Dark Matter an episodic series,” said CEO Erik Schreuder, ”with episodes selling at a budget price of $14.99.”
”Any further episodes would, however, need to be dependent on the success of the previous installment. The first installment is what has launched recently on Steam and is simply called Dark Matter.”
The great issue here is that nowhere was it disclosed that Dark Matter was an episodic venture, and that’s something GOG.com feels is problem enough to warrant the refunds to its customers.
”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,” informed GOG.com.
If you purchased Dark Matter before 21 October 2013 at 15:00 GMT, which is when they updated the gamecard ”where we feel it adequately reflects the game”, then you can contact GOG.com’s 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).”
Given the situation it’s now a lot less likely Dark Matter will get enough sales to warrant any future episodes.
