The Price of Discounts

Nov 9

Posted by

Unlike a lot of people, I am not pre-downloading Fallout 4. For reasons:

 Hi [name],

Thank you again for your pre-order of Fallout 4 from Funstock Digital.

You may be aware the game is available for Pre-Load this evening (Friday 6th Nov) and some retailers are sending out keys.

Following the recent release of Call of Duty Black Ops 3 where a small number of customers received duplicate or invalid keys we have taken the decision to hold the delivery of keys until Monday (9th Nov) to test our delivery system and ensure you are not caused any unnecessary inconvenience.

If you would prefer to cancel your order and obtain a refund then please contact support@funstock.co.uk

Sorry again but we hope you appreciate we want to get this right and don’t want to cause you and any of our customers any issues.

Kind Regards, Funstock Digital

Provided that I actually get to the play the game in the next few days, I’m willing to sweat a bit. After all, I bought it at $42.14. But the clock is ticking Funstock.

Fake Edit: Email saying the key is ready, but website is 503 for the past three hours:

I hope someone is losing money on this.

I hope someone is losing money on this.

Fake Edit 2: Electric Boogaloo: Site down to “scheduled maintenance.”

Great timing.

Great timing.

Not sure which would be considered worse: the lie that this is, or the truth someone would schedule website maintenance during Fallout 4’s release.

Real Edit 3: First Blood:

Finally got smart and checked the Twitter page:

Never again.

Never again.

FunStock, eh? More like LaughingStock. Or FuckYouStock. I’d threaten to DDoS your servers if they were up.

Final Edit: the Reckoning: Got in, more than six hours later. Their website is still coughing up blood and blank pages nine out of ten times. When I managed to actually get the store page, the Login button link takes you to a “scheduled maintenance” message 100% of the time. I went around the backdoor by going to the Account page, which then asks you to log in.

In any case, lesson learned. Maybe. If I would have went with GMG, I would have received the key no problem, but paid ~$5 more. Is it worth that? Maybe. I got work tomorrow regardless, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

Posted on November 9, 2015, in Miscellany and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 7 Comments.

  1. C. T. Murphy | November 9, 2015 at 7:48 pm

    That’s a real shame. I contributed to the ‘evils of preordering’ by doing so within the first hour they went up for Fallout 4 during the summer. I didn’t have any issues like this, but I know there are some angry gamers out there who wished I had waited because of principles or something.

    All I know is I’ve purchased every Fallout game (except Brotherhood of Steel, the shitty twin stick shooter) and I am not going to stop now.

    Like

  2. Rohan | November 9, 2015 at 7:56 pm

    Heh, maybe they somehow “oversold” Fallout 4. Not entirely sure how, but maybe each retailer was only guaranteed a certain number of keys. So they’re doing this to encourage people to take refunds voluntarily.

    Like

    • Azuriel | November 9, 2015 at 8:30 pm

      It’s truly an absurd situation, right? This isn’t airline tickets where you know X number of people aren’t going to show up and you lose money for every empty seat. These keys will be sold. So now I’m forced to contemplate the most cynical scenario possible in which they would like for X number of people to ask for refunds so those keys can be sold for a higher price to someone else.

      I mean, the alternative is simply that they’re terrible at logistics and can’t be bothered to plan to accommodate the customers whom already bought their goods. I don’t even know which is worse at this point.

      #tantrum

      Like

  3. SynCaine | November 10, 2015 at 12:11 am

    Continues to do poor people things, wonders why he gets poor people results.

    The pre-order was $60 on Steam. You paid $43. How much time have you lost for that $17 now?

    Like

    • Azuriel | November 10, 2015 at 12:35 am

      Six hours refreshing the page inbetween doing other things. I wasn’t planning on playing any tonight; the whole anxiety was over getting the download started, so it’ll be ready for tomorrow. Had it worked straight-away, I would have ended up doing the same things anyway given the bandwidth drain.

      Besides, as we all know, it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message the principle. MSRP is for chumps. The real lesson here is that FunStock is amateur-hour and I should have gone with GMG.

      Like

  4. Trippin Ninja | November 10, 2015 at 12:41 pm

    You are still in better shape than me at least. Last week I lost my Pip Boy Edition that I preordered back in June from GameStop. They sent me an email saying I need to change my shipping to 1 day if I wanted it on launch day. The link sent me to a page where the only clickable object was a cancel shipment button.
    I thought about it before clicking, surely this doesn’t cancel my order right? It would say cancel order then right? Well I was wrong it cancelled my whole order and after a phone call with CS at GameStop I learned they can’t undo any cancellations of preorders even for ultra rare items that all have a name on them…..sigh
    My own fault, I know and accept that but I still can’t help feeling burned on the whole deal. Lesson learned.

    Like

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