Western governments need to come together and force refund policies on the gaming industry. The lack of consumer protection is appalling, and the industry has failed to address defective products for decades. Every digital storefront should offer hassle-free refunds.
One piece of consumer protection that the consumer can do on their own is to simply not pre-order games, and to check reviews prior to making purchases. There's generally no reason that one needs to play a game as soon as it goes live, and it's pretty easy to check online what others think of almost any product for sale these days, and to become aware of any major flaws it might have. If people choose to ignore such resources and make poor purchasing decisions anyway, then they shouldn't be all that surprised when something doesn't live up to their expectations.
And refunds of games should already be relatively hassle-free on the PC side of things, at least from the major distribution platforms. Steam and Epic allow one to return a game so long as they've played it for under 2 hours, and GOG's policy is even more lenient. A couple hours should be enough time, in most cases, to determine whether a game at least runs properly on one's system, and largely functions as expected. It doesn't sound like the return policies on consoles are currently as useful though, so some improvements could be made there.
A problem with government-mandated return policies is that government officials often don't have a good idea of what makes sense for something like this, and if the restrictions are too lenient, people will be prone to abuse them. A digital storefront shouldn't be required to accept returns of games that people have played through, for example. And there are many who would take advantage of stores if they are required to accept returns of physical games that have been opened.
Again, the consumer can do a lot on their own to protect themselves, should they choose to make use of the resources available to them.
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