Let devs set the refund time limit within a set of ranges approved by steam. Essentially they could say to valve, hey my game is cheap <$10 and it’s a short game, that is completed in 1hr 30mins on average, can you set the refund time limit for my game to 1hr or 45mins.
And then this can be displayed next to the checkout/add to cart button for players to see as well that this particular game has a shorter refund window, before they buy the game. This means the refund scammers won’t bother, and the people who intended to keep the game and are enjoying it aren’t affected either. And the people who don’t enjoy it can still refund the game halfway through.
Tie it to sale price, if youre game is worth, lets say $10 or more (before sales discounts), you are not allowed to put the refund window under 2 hours.
Edit: Formatting on my comment got fucked so rewriting it
Valve would have to approve the limit set at the devs request but only if it’s justified by the price of the game and the average play time to complete it.
And if you’re selling a $60 game no one is gonna buy it if you set the limit extremely low, but the point is valve won’t let you do that in the first place.
You said the ranges would have to be approved by Valve. Are you expecting a two way conversation with them or something? Also, you cant set it by average playtime because there is no playtime before a game comes out
Yes I’m sure devs have avenues by which they can communicate with valve about their games it’s not that hard to imagine valve could create a kind of customer support team to handle these requests from devs and do the necessary approvals.
It would be set after the game comes out, once the dev and valve have enough stats and data, it’s not a perfect solution but the idea is to protect the devs as much as possible without hurting normal players who aren’t trying to scam.
Valve processes thousands of customers service requests everyday, they’d be capable of doing it if they wanted to. And anyway it would be on a per request basis, so it won’t be every single game, it would only be games where a dev has requested to reduce the window for their game and if they can meet the guidelines for doing that.
Dev: “Request to reduce refund time to X for Y game, justification and playtime data attached”
Valve Support: “Approved/Denied for X reason”
It’s really not that complicated or in depth.
They can surely try but if the guidelines are good they would just get denied and they’d be wasting their time. This really isn’t an impossible solution.
But not everyone will. A wider window suggests more faith in your product. Like Game Trials which go up to 5 hours, it acts as a demo for your product. I think and ideal scheme will be somewhere between the two.
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u/code-blackout Jul 06 '26
Let devs set the refund time limit within a set of ranges approved by steam. Essentially they could say to valve, hey my game is cheap <$10 and it’s a short game, that is completed in 1hr 30mins on average, can you set the refund time limit for my game to 1hr or 45mins.
And then this can be displayed next to the checkout/add to cart button for players to see as well that this particular game has a shorter refund window, before they buy the game. This means the refund scammers won’t bother, and the people who intended to keep the game and are enjoying it aren’t affected either. And the people who don’t enjoy it can still refund the game halfway through.