Diablo III

Public demand for a game is a great thing, but not if your company can’t handle it. That’s a lesson that Blizzard is learning the hard way with Diablo III, as complaints of server outages and gameplay crashes have drawn the Korea Fair Trade Commission to Blizzard’s Seoul offices.

Normally, it’s Blizzard company policy that a refund can’t be issued for one of their purchased games once the product has been used. But if the KFTC is involved, government influence may outweigh the developer’s own rules. According to the Wall Street Journal, South Korea’s electronic commerce law states that a customer is entitled to a refund if the problem with their purchased item isn’t resolved within a week. Blizzard can set up extra servers to ease the problem, but the legal implications remain with that kind of deadline in place.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, any type of refund would result in serious harm to Diablo III‘s revenue, as 10 percent of the game’s sales have come from South Korea, although the bulk of it (3.5 million copies sold) is within the United States.

Source: Wall Street Journal