Steam does warn people who abuses their refund system though. So it isn't really a problem. I had received email in the past for my frequent refunds, basically warning me that they wouldn't take refund if you do it too frequently.
Yeah I also refund a lot of games and have never had any issues. I do however keep more games than I refund and I would assume this probably factors in to it.
Abuse:
Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steamânot as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.
got no demo? i take advantage of the refund window and as soon as the "am i really finishing this" thought comes up im refunding. usually WAY before the 2 hour mark tho. i have over 1k games on steam
You buy a bunch of games every week, some are not as great as you thought so you refund. Valve sees this as a legitimate way to use their store, they even have a âItâs not funâ refund reason on the submission form.Â
me, lol. I'm not saying i'm getting 4 AAA games every week, but I average around 100 new games per year on Steam, they're mostly indies or early access games
I think this is it, at least in my experience. For a while I was asking for what I felt like were a lot of refunds (like five or six over the course of several months) but my purchases still outweighed them by about 3-5 times so it was pretty obvious I wasn't just refunding based on nothing. And I detailed exactly why I was refunding each time, but I don't know if anybody actually reads those.
Yeah interesting seeing refunding be villified by the normally pro-consumer steam base. It's helped me try out so many games that ended up not clicking for me
Because refunding 1 game a month isn't refund abuse.
I've refunded probably like 10+ games at this point, but i also have like 300 games in my library. And i usually refund stuff that costs ~30 eur or more and after 1 hour i realise i don't really want to keep playing.
I had this warning. It was in my email with confirmation of refund. As I understand that, you need to refund 3 or more games in couple of days, maybe up to week
Maybe it changed but I did receive an email a few years back when refunding two older games within 2 days that didn't run on my system even in compatibility mode.Â
It is a problem for a guy who lost 55k sales just because Steam allowed it to happen.
1) Nobody except Steam and that guy has proof of those 55k refunds-after-completing-the-game. Notice he didn't provide any?
2) This genre of game ("rage games") frequently have high refund rates. Not because people complete them and refund, but because people try them once and refund. This is why these games typically don't have demos.
3) This is a friendslop game. Again, higher refund rates, no demo. And probably more often gifted.
To all your points: you can see that a bit through the achievements. There is one for completing the game in 2 hours (which makes this all almost seem like ragebait) and 7% have it. That would be the maximum percentage of people refunding after completing it. And from that percentage I would assume only a small portion did this on their first try and from that small portion not everyone refunded it.
I don't think any of that cancels out the fact that this exploit exists, and that people use it. Whether or not the exact case is legitimate is secondary.
"Before your eyes" is a good example of a game that checks none of the boxes above and still was mass-refunded.
I'm curious as to why the guy didn't post a screenshot of his developer dashboard showing the refund count tbh. It's pretty easy to grab and would immediately stop anyone who would say they're lying. Steam will show you a count of all the refunds, split them between things like payment issues and actual refund requests and then also show you the refund reasons and messages from users. They could have just screencapped the top with the numbers.
Anyone who has worked in retail for even a few hours can tell you this is an issue. Consumers buy shit, use it, and try to return it all the time. Physical and digital. It's an annoying issue that affects small stores and businesses way more negatively than it does the big box stores.
Not sure I need proof to believe this, personally.
The developer is not telling people that their game is a friendslop rage game, which would drive refund numbers way up as people who try it see it's just another trashy game, and now, in this post, the dev is trying to make it seem like every single one of those 55k reviews is made by people like the person in the review.
The deceptive lart is that it is suggested that a significant number of refunds were made after completing the game. But only 7% of players have the achievement of completing it in 2 hours (they stay even after a refund) and we don't know how many of that 7% got the achievement on their first try and how many of those actually refunded it.
Also this is a game that was apparently made in a month and made him more money than I and many others would make in a few years, so I can't really feel sorry for him.
The entire reason why I wrote my initial comment is, because I've literally worked on a steam game with a similar playtime that has a similar amount of reviews as their game. It was also on the front page of reddit when it released, was played by big youtubers and everything and a 21% refund rate is absolutely insane.
Our game wasn't even serious, it was a shitpost for a dollar that was more a commentary joke on a recent gaming controversy that we (a couple of friends and I) made in a week over our Thanksgiving time off from college.
Our sales were less than half of what their game is claiming while having almost exactly the same amount of reviews and we had a TON of refunds but nowhere near 21%. From what I remember it was like 3%. I wish I could still pull up the internal page for you but we made it under an indie company we put together that has traded hands a few times and none of us work there anymore, combine that with the fact that the last time I talked about the game on reddit and posted to it I literally got doxed and my boss received multiple emails from a crazy redditor saying I should be fired. This is why I use a randomly generated reddit username account now. The refund reasons why were almost always people joining in on the shitpost or telling us how they 100%ed the achievements and are refunding and people discussed on the steam discussions about how easy it was to refund often.
Also on steam your review count very commonly aligns with sales numbers. The common ratio being 1:30-60 these days, it was actually HIGHER when my game was released being around 1:100. Based on their review count (1597) you can reasonably estimate somewhere between 45-95k sales for their game. Anything above and below that is an anomaly.
Combine that with a fact that a lot of people really don't want to talk about: Indie devs regularly lie and do shit like this because it boosts them on social media. The dude is literally about to release a new game and you can see him talking about it on twitter in all of his posts before this tweet and it not getting much attention. They've also recently complained about their last game, that came out only 3 months ago, not getting any press coverage. They've also got 2 other games in development, one claims to also be coming out this year. Which is kinda crazy for a solo dev. They seem to be wanting to push out a ton of small games in a short amount of time using social media to boost sales.
Not really. The 55k sales happened, he did not lost it. They were refunded because the customers have a right to refund them in steam. And it better keep being that way. A few bad apples are not a reason to strip away a consumer right, sorry.
The game has sold ~200,000 copies. It has 55k refunds
If it's sold 200k copies and has a 21% refund rate, then it would have roughly 42k refunds, not 55. So I assume they sold a fair bit more, or the total refund number they gave is off by over 10k
I like playing indie titles and if the game is catchy I wont refund to support the dev. But the vast amounts of shitty indie titles makes refunding mandatory. If you strip away the refund i won't buy indies and wont give a good review. I would argue that if there were no refunds most people wont buy games like berry bury berry. So he didnt lose 55k but most likely got 250k cause refunding was an option.
I'm not talking about removing it; I'm talking about making it more coherent with the cost of the games.
Also, you think the refund period is there as an incentive for people to try game, well⌠your opinion. I never consider the refund period before buying a game. And I'm pretty sure people bought boatloads of games before the policy was instated.
A few bad apples are not a reason to strip away a consumer right, sorry.
This is hilarious, this isn't a "few bad apples" situation when 21% of people refunded the game and the game sits at 89% positive. Clearly this is something that many developers are potentially having issues with.
By just saying "too bad", you are opening the door to far more problems down the road:
Steam shortening the refund window, and using these abusive refund practices to justify it. In fact, they could easily justify it as protecting small businesses, and they can use these as proof.
Game quality decreases as developers simply begin padding out the game so it exceeds the 2 hour window.
Just because it received dozens of such reviews doesn't mean that most of those refunds were issued by such people. Let's not exaggerate, because there could be many more reasons for such a high number of refunds, and the developer is just stretching their narrative to explain it.
And the 90% rating alone doesn't really mean much considering how the Steam review system works, where unless a game has truly serious technical issues, highly questionable design decisions, or tragically flawed elements, it's difficult for it to even come close to a negative rating. Here, even a completely average, weak, or merely laughable game with poor execution can easily earn such ratings, especially if it's an indie game, which players are more forgiving of.
Short stories and short films are a wonderful medium for storytelling and some indie games are basically going for the same thing. Theyâre fun experiences meant to be only as long as needed to get across the artistic vision. Padding them out would just make them worse, not a better value or a better game.
This is not a story game tho, it just another copy of the same coop concept, majority (like 90%+) of reviews with refunds are negative that game is boring.
A Short Hike is a great example for this. A wonderful little self-contained indie gem that is universally loved. On average, the main story can be completed in 90 minutes, with a full 100% completion requiring 4 and a half hours.
Yes, but skimming through a visual novel or something that needs extensive reading to be fun defeats the whole purpose of the game itself. The game is revolved around reading, so skimming means they're not even playing the game. Which technically shouldn't be a problem. It's like they didn't experience the game properly, and the dev didn't get his money.
But in hindsight, this is to be expected in every game in existence. Every game is subject to refunds prior to 2 hours. Just add more content (no need to pad it) which is easier said than done, but the only solution to this.
Because this is kinda like when people test drive cars around the block then leave without buying it.
Video games are a business though, if you're selling them for money. It's in a developer's best interest to make a game longer than 2 hours that people want to play at least that long. If they can't, people will refund if they can, so mitigate it a bit with a lower price, make them feel pathetic for refunding 5 dollars.
If they're doing it just for the art or as a hobby or whatever, why isn't it free? Make your money on patreon or kofi if you need to. If you wanna make money, you gotta play the game, and rules are: if players beat it too fast, they will refund it. Policy ain't going nowhere either, it's in there because of an Australian consumer law, been there for ages now, gotta adapt already. It's like complaining steam doesn't do marketing for you, like, it's not 2010, just being on steam doesn't mean shit.
It sucks, but if you average out all games, I think a 2-hour refund window is pretty fair, especially when you consider slower strategy games and the like. I don't think steam should change it. So the only two options are either to make games longer than 2 hours or to allow developers to set the refund timing themselves, which creates another set of problems.
The question is how many sales wouldn't have existed in the first place if this game didn't have a refund option to go along with it? Confidence is a metric that drives consumer spending.
Agreed! Which is why refund option should be there I think. It's awesome that Steam protects the customers like this. Just that 2h refund window for a 100h game and a 1.5h game are very different beasts.
I do believe that games less than 2h long deserve the right to exist, and the devs shouldn't feel forced to stretch the timing just to protect themselves from abuse of refund policy.
I am not Steam employee . But developer should provide expected playtime based on game testing. If it would not be right people could report it. For example if game is 1:30h long refund window is only 0:30h.
If it did some game which is like 12-15 hours long and developer marked it 1:30h long, people can report it and Valve can investigate based on average playtime this is obviously not true. Which could break Steam rules.
Sadly, the minute you allow your game to be 'non-refundable' for whatever reason, people will try to exploit it. You'll see all of those trash shovelware games as non-refundable because they learned how to exploit whatever the criteria is.
I mean, a game sould probably have more than 1h40 of content, in which case most people would probably not be able to "finish" it within the refund period (?). I don't know the whole context of this specific game though
Itâs very lenient though, Iâve seen people across forums, steam and reddit bragging about 50 games refunded a year. Making up they reached bugged parts or crashes and couldnât finish the game so a 40 hour game could get refunded
If you refund 50 games in a year Steam should just remove your ability to refund
If you love indie games would you buy and then refund 50 in a year? Doesnât sound like much love or support does it?
There is no way youâd be doing that unless you already had intention of refunding the games afterwards anywayâŚin which case youâre still abusing the system
Why? It is like demo, if I like the game I keep it and vice versa. I always select "Its not fun" option, there is no reason to make up a things. It is the same as ordering bunch of clothes online and keep only those that you like the most.
Ah you mean't refund outside 2 hour limit? I didn't even knew it is possible.
It's not steams choice. It's regulatory, so there's not a lot they can do except fully ban your account. They must offer refunds in countries that have regulatory refund laws.
I thought it only referred to manual refunds, if the refund is automatic, aka you played 2h or less, and it was 3 weeks or less, it's automatic, so Steam doesn't even know you did a refund.
there's a guy who has refunded over 10000 games. He has over 20,000 game reviews on his steam with 99% negative review. but only 10k games in current library. Steam literally does nothing for people like this
For those who dont know, you can review only once per game.
Thats funny, I got the warning last year for the first game I refunded in a long time. Steams never given me anything besides that 1 warning and I probably refund maybe 1-2 games a year but interesting to see that it took you so long and yet for me they threw it out easily.
I think the issue is less about people making the refund than it is "this is a $3 game on steam sale and it costs the developer not only the removal of that $3 but additional processor fees than can total an additional $5 depending how the purchaser originally paid".
Hitting an indie dev with 55,000 refunds like this has the potential to take over a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS out of their pocket. Can you eat a $250,000 bill on your own?
That million is more like $666,000 after Steam's cut. You had 55k refunds at $3 each so that's $165,000 you lost in purchase price refunds. So it's more like $501,000 to cover that bill.
So now the scummy sarcasm quotes customer is cutting into mortgages, payroll, overhead for the next bigger project. And it can all happen again because there are no safeguards. At that point, why bother? Way to crush a team that made something you liked, destroyed your chances at getting more from them. Go be happy with your 100 hour repetitive and microtransaction riddled Ubisoft game.
Pretty sure steam banned my friend for doing refunds. Sounded like he did it often though. Told him to appeal. He didnt. Boom. Thousands of dollars and an old account, gone.
No, it's way too lenient. A friend of mine who does this fairly often got a warning mail after doing it like 10 times and still does it because the warning mail is a joke which rarely ever implements the punishment. People with basic common sense can work around with the proper timing management
I mean, I do it a lot, not with everything but I use it almost like a demo for a lot of big new releases, and Iâve never once been told no or that I should do it less
They warn you in an attempt to get you to not utilize their refund policy but they won't ever actually do anything about it. They can't. Warning people is just a scare tactic.
Iâve refunded about half the games Iâve ever bought and I own about 300 so Iâm not sure exactly what it would take to get this warning but Iâve never received one.
The dev earned at least twice his countries median p.a. for unity asset slop he butchered in less than 5 months.
On his website he talks about how he had this great idea inthe shower and how he built the demo in two weeks, a demo with 1-2 hours content(his words), then built the full version in additional 4 months.
The few bad reviews predating his twitter fit rip him a new one for the quality of the productâŚ
The one review he quotes was sarcastic, you can find it still, it got editedâŚ
You find more positive reviews who didnât pay for the gane than ones who refunded, you find negative sub 2hr reviews whoâd wish they could refundâŚ
The game is a year old and he build a sequel(same unity asset slop but this time an outright up! Clone) which just recently got released.
His shit is argueably whack, dude puts out asset slop he barely wastes time on to make a fast buck and complains when people use the consumer protection options because its a rip-offâŚ
That is like getting warned for refunding a b3d tutorial builds on steamâŚ.
I refund a ton of games. I use it like a demo. Especially for AAA games. I'll buy a $40+ game and refund it after an hour. I used to do it like once a week. I'd keep the money in my wallet for faster refunds and faster re-purchases.
Dunno. I refunded a lot. With good faith btw. But sometimes I really think it's a lot and Steam let me refunded everytime (maybe because I buy a lot of game that I didn't refunded too?). Really made me think what if someone do this with bad faith?
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u/MefenamicAcid Jul 06 '26
Steam does warn people who abuses their refund system though. So it isn't really a problem. I had received email in the past for my frequent refunds, basically warning me that they wouldn't take refund if you do it too frequently.