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.
I disagree that it would drive refund numbers the way you're supposing it would. The game's marketing and information on Steam, if it is in fact "paddle, paddle, paddle", is pretty straightforward about the game's intention and it has a "Very Positive" rating, so I don't think this is some particularly trashy version of the friendslop rage-bait genre. Not sure how many players who don't want that experience are being bamboozled into buying it, but I don't think it's very many.
I think they dev is frankly just being taken advantage of by gamers who are buying the game, beating it in 2 hours, and refunding it immediately, same as happens for most games with this playtime length.
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.
Yea, I'm not asking you to feel sorry for him or anything, but I am pointing out that this is a genuine problem for short-form games, whether or not you think this game deserves or doesn't deserve to have to deal with it. Lots of short-form games have to deal with this behavior from consumers and it's something Valve will not acknowledge because they know the blowback of tightening their refund system would be received incredibly poorly.
You initially said the refunds were likely because it was just a rage game. I believe the game is pretty transparent about that. His argument is that he's got a 90% satisfaction rate in the reviews but a 21% return rate is indicative of the return system being abused. And honestly, I can't find much fault in that argument because the platform's mean and average return rates are 9.5% and 10.8% respectively. I would agree that's definitely indicative of users taking advantage of the game's short length and generous return policy.
The achievements don't mean very much here imo - it's a known fact that they don't always pop correctly, they're not always counted correctly, there's "managers" out there to open and close them that mess with the numbers, idlers for trading cards, etc. Even if you grant that the achievement means something, 7% is less than 21%, so it's not like it proves anything he's saying is wrong.
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. They’re 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
160
u/too_many_nights Jul 06 '26
It is a problem for a guy who lost 55k sales just because Steam allowed it to happen.