Almost as if, your customers will respect you, if you respect them.

Although Reddit disappoints me so much that I sigh whenever I see it linked, I am somewhat pleased that when GOG had to link a thread, they chose to use an old.reddit page in particular.

I used to think I wouldn't quit Reddit until they got rid of the "old" style. Then the API debacle happened two years ago, and whelp. Here I am. 🙃

At least GOG knows how to treat its userbase.

6 years ago when Outer Worlds released, I paid for one month of Game Pass, then cancelled it after 2 or 3 weeks or so when I had finished the game and got my money back. It was just a trial, like $2 or so, and it wasn't like I was buying the game, it just so happened that when I clicked cancel it asked me why I was cancelling, and when I clicked "financial reasons" they gave me the option to refund. So I don't feel like it was abusing the service, I genuinely only wanted to pay for that one month anyway.

But abusing GOG? That's where I draw the line.
In theory, if you pay for the game there, you can download the installed which is DRM free, and without playing it you could refund it, and GOG Galaxy wouldn't count any played hours. Although you'd need a pretty good internet connection to download that beefy installer, it's not a small game.

That reminds me of something similar my ISP said. "Don't be afraid of the bandwidth", if you give your customers more bandwidth they aren't actually going to fill it, they'll still run roughly the same downloads just more quickly.

Here it's at 12:10 in this video archive of their talk at RIPE: https://ripe84.ripe.net/archives/video/797/

And here when they gave the same talk at SwiNOG they also mentioned how their network ring in Wintherthur is still pretty much equally loaded after 10G and 25G home connections became available: https://youtu.be/wXmJCzMeIBo?t=1195

Well yeah. If you're nice to your customers, the customers will be nice to you.

How do they know who abuses their refund policy?

They can't track play time on downloaded titles at all.

That wording seems very iffy, what's the difference between using and "abusing" their refunds? How could a player you trust "abuse" said policy and how would you track it considering you are the one issuing the refund in the first place? Just sounds like a weirdly resentful way to say it, almost like they don't want to issue the refunds but are doing it purely for PR.