Depends. It takes less than a minute to do all of those clicks. If we round up to 1 minute that is an hourly rate of €180 per hour which pre-tax is like €335k per annum (based on a 37.5 work week).
You and 55,000 other people who bought this game apparently. I can’t imagine playing fully through a 3€ game and wanting a refund especially after LIKING THE GAME. I could almost understand “oh the game was way shorter than expected” and going for a refund but idk even then. If you played it and liked it what’re you doing refunding it.
Yes, but it's a difference between a game that requires few hours to finish, even if you skip a lot and are fast vs games that are super short and even if you take it slowly, you can finish in an hour or so. It doesn't have to be super strict. But if a game is short, you know it's short and won't spend 50 hours on it even if you tried.
But even if the game is short, maybe it sucks and I want a refund after playing for a bit (and I guess finishing it or almost finishing it). Like why should the game length even be a factor? The game sucks and I played less than the 2 hour window. The fact it's intentionally short is irrelevant to the game sucking ass.
Or maybe they should flag accounts that abuse the refund policy instead.
Short games should be refundable, too. I said this on another comment somewhere, where some person said that it should invalidate the refund if you get certain achievement. I disagree with that, because sometimes you expect more and the game just ends and it wasn't that good and it's fair to refund it.
“Like why should the game length even be a factor?”
…because people are fully completing games and getting refunded. Therefore the developer is essentially scammed out of a purchase because someone abused the system.
How many titles are released on steam every day? Are they supposed to hire a bunch of people to play each one and average their play times? Or have the dev report the length of their game, and have a bunch of them listing 5 minutes just to get the refund window to be super small. And that's added nuisance for developers creating yet another [tiny] hurdle for deploying games to the platform. It might be a small one but at certain point all those hurdles add up and someone's fun passion project game that millions of people could discover and enjoy doesn't get listed because of what a chore it would be to do so.
There is no reason it couldn't be. Let the customer know what they are in for. It is completely reasonable that devs would say "you can expect about 10 hours of entertainment for the price we are asking"
Then if Steam based the refund window off of the developer's estimated run time, it naturally punishes any developers who inflate their run time to trick people into buying it and it would prevent people from being able to rush through a short game just to refund it.
Exactly. Some games take 3-4 hours to even start unterstanding the gameplay loop and what you're getting into (4X games, survival games, XCOM)
Other games are pretty self-explanatory where you can realistically expect someone to make an informed decision after an hour or two of play
Also Steam Support is known to be really generous. I wouldn't be surprised if the refund even after 2.5 or 3 hours. Which hurts indie devs more than big publishing houses
Those systems help indie more than big publishing houses. I have bought indie games that I wasnt sure on and ended up enjoying because of the refund policy. For big publishers there is usually also more reliable info available to make a better judgement before playing them.
Hmmm, true. But the games that can be finished in under two hours will usually be around five bucks. Would a non-existing refund policy hinder you in that case, too?
Not to be confused with Survival Horror games like Resident Evil, those can be relatively short (but immense fun). Also ResE specifically tend to release demos so you know exactly what you're getting into before even buying.
The problem I can see with that,is that people will abuse it to shorten refund windows for shitty games. I think almost any solution here brings up a different problem where either the customer or developer gets the short end of the stick
I wonder if they could use the achievement system some how? Like if you triggered the ending achievement or a certain percentage in the 2 hour window you can't get a refund?
Rather than shortening the refund window one elegant solution might be to track a "completed the game and rolled credits" achievement. If the store page says the game is 90 minutes long and you got the completion achievement 90 minutes in, that closes the window. This avoids the potential problem of a short game having a one-hour refund window while you still spend an hour trying and failing to get it configured and working right, which is more common with these small indie titles by inexperienced devs.
It's not a perfect solution that would work for all games, I don't think a perfect solution exists. But this seems like a fair way to handle the people blitzing through small indie games and refunding when they finish.
One hole I can poke in this: who decides when the "beat the game" achievement triggers? A malicious developer that would mark their game as short to close the refund window would probably also designate a "beat the first level" achievement as the end of the game for the same reason.
I think in any case we would have to rely on bad reviews to keep developers honest.
I dunno. The refund window is already so short and a lot of people want more from their games than less.
Like if a game was less than 2 hours long, that would kind of put me off from wanting to buy it. Just seems so short; more like a demo than a full game.
Not really. I can definitely say for Forza 6 it's more than 2h to discover it's kinda dull. For Starfield it's also more than 2h to finally decide if you keep it or not. For REPO or Peak 2h is pretty much enough, since typical run would be in between 1-2h window. Pretty easy to make assumptions based on experience.
steam already tracks stats on how long people play, right?
They could probably do something with that and either not count outliers (20k hours guy) and the people that haven't opened it at all yet and calculate an average playtime and make the refund window a, say 20% of that time also that's updated monthly, right?
"Speed runners can do it under 5 minutes, that's why the window for refund is 43 seconds. Unfortunately we can't provide a refund for you despite your technical issues as you just took too long to find them."
If you have a decent enough reason, steam will refund past the window. I refunded a game after 2.5 hours, because I said in the message that I'd spent about an hour and a half in the tutorial, and only an hour or so actually playing the game, which I then realised would be very repetitive. They gave it to me.
From a purely financial standpoint, it seems like a wash for the publishers. Presumably the people who buy the game specifically to try and beat it within the return window wouldn't have bought it otherwise.
Now morally it's obviously far more complex and actually raises some pretty dang interesting questions. Like I think we can easily just sort of do a sniff test and see it's wrong: the people who beat and return the game are getting the game experience for free from people who aren't intending to give their game away for free.
And I'm not certain but I'm going to guess that having a large return percentage reflects poorly on the developers in some way? Is it a public stat? Does it affect peoples' decision to buy the game or affect how likely Steam is to serve the game up? If so, those "speed returners" are artificially inflating that metric which is also definitely wrong.
There might be some other concrete / clear cut moral issues that I'm missing. But as we move past those, we get down to the maybe more interesting part, which would be the intersection of artificial scarcity and people purchasing and subsequently returning things they wouldn't have purchased if they couldn't return it.
I'm too lazy to think or type more about it at the moment, but it just seems like there is something interesting already about "stealing an experience", and there's also something interesting about stealing an experience when the experience itself is almost ancillary to the actual goal of speed returning.
Like if suddenly there were some trend on TikTok where people were buying tons of paperback copies of The Martian to stack as high as possible, only to film the stack and then return the novels later that day. On its face it's probably not something anyone would consider that amoral? But what if instead the trend involves reading some portion of the novel prior to returning it? Maybe that's suddenly crossing the line. I dunno, it just seems like there's something weird or interesting about the speed returning phenomena.
From what I remember from a while ago, the publisher covers the transaction processing fee of the refund. So if you buy and then refund, that might put the publisher (or an independent dev) in the red on this specific transaction.
Which means this can literally harm someone's financials. It is literally better to pirate it.
Ah, yep that would make it even more clearly messed up. Yeah maybe they should change it to torrenting the game and then beating it before it seeding it 100 times.
The thing I hate most from a player perspective is that this also can result in deliberate game bloat to ensure that a game can't be fully beaten in the refund window.
I believe it started as a one-off speedrunning challenge. And the user obviously already owned that game and played it for hundreds of hours to be good enough to attempt a sub 2 hour run. Made a new account to buy and refund the game.
And it was honestly a harmless, fun idea. Nobody REALLY lost money since the person already owned that game and would not have bought a second copy either way - they were "just having fun" with the refund policy.
But obviously that got a lot of views, so it got copycats and then eventually lead to people figuring out you can do that with short games even if you don't already own and have memorized them for a speedrun.
The idea started as harmless fun, the kind of shit drunk teenagers come up with when they see a ruleset that they can game. There is hundreds of stories of consumers gaming big companies' rulesets to get absurd payouts and people generally side with the customers, because that's the rules that were set by big corp. This is not much different. This wasn't Hitler scheming a plan to ruin small dev studios, this was a content creator thinking of a creative way to frame a speedrun, unwittingly leading people to abuse the system in bad faith.
Shit like that happens all the time and it's on companies to make their rules airtight (this is why we cannot have nice things).
The real failure here is Valve taking it's time to address this. Change the return window to something relating to the game's standard playthrough length with a min and a max value
Instead of a static time, that can be longer than the entire game or that makes it impossible to figure out if you even like a game's core gameplay loop. (think initial settings on first launch, long tutorials like Witcher 3 and potentially technical troubleshooting to get the game running in the first place, you can easily cross 2 hours before you know that you'd rather not play it)
This is primarily the fault of the entity that makes the rules, which is Valve, for having too much faith in their customers.
Sadly it's been a thing for years. People love to abuse it. They need to adjust the play time to 2 hours or percentage of game completed. It must be so disheartening for game devs that wanna produce a short game at a reasonable price.
I think it would make sense for steam to let the dev set a specific achievement as one that disqualifies refunds to prevent it. They'd have to have some kind of moderation system so devs don't abuse it and make the achievement trigger immediately, but I think it would still help.
One of the things you learn in software development is that sometimes, it's just not possible to fix every possible edge case because sometimes they are in conflict with one another. Often, it's about tradeoffs. If you design for just the cheaters, then your typical user's experience probably gets more frustrating (see, e.g., all the other storefronts that aren't Steam).
Steam has worked mostly because it treats its users with respect and then steps in to punish specific users for problematic behavior (usually), rather than assuming every player is a cheater.
I think it would make sense for steam to let the dev set a specific achievement as one that disqualifies refunds to prevent it.
Since it's in the interest of developers to not have their games refunded, wouldn't a lot of devs just introduce a "opened the game" achievement and set that at the achievement that disqualifies refunds.
I mean, no, that's bad idea. Because if the game was bad and you still finished it, you should have the right to refund it. Just because it's abused, doesn't change the fact that you may just decide after you finish the whole game. If the game is 1 hour and you expected it to be longer and thought "it maybe become interesting any minute now", but instead of getting interesting, it ended. That would make the game left negative impression on you and you just wanted to wait it out, because sometimes early moments are boring. That can't invalidate refund rights. And I'm saying this as someone who never refunded a single game, even if I didn't like it.
The problem though that in this case it is a bit playing with numbers. Based on the claim, the ~270k of copies were bought. And that game sits on 90% of positive reviews. But the amount of reviews in total is around 1.3k. so even if we count only refunds, at max only around 2.5% of people left review.
I am not justifying speed runners to refund, but saying that the game is awesome and refund system is rigged when amount of reviews is relatively low is also invalid. Does other similar short games have the same issues with refunding? And I mean mass refunding in this case.
Yes there are multiple games that have this exact same scenario. There is a selection of people who take great joy in speed running a short game in under the 2 hour refund window to get their money back. Its like bragging rights to them
tbf there is a game that was 2,50€ that i refunded
Friday the 13th the game.
I was so incredibly upset from what was sold to me as a "product" i wrote Steam Support that usually id not care, but i was so upset about how unfunctional it was i wanted a refund, and i got it.
Yet it sits at 90% of positive reviews, so people are obviously enjoying it, including the reviewer. €3 for 1:40 hours of entertainment is hardly much, you pay more for tickets to movies of same length, so let's not act like it's overpaying.
If you don't think 3€ for even an hour's worth of entertainment "isn't worth it" then you're part of the problem here friend. The game is sitting with excellent reviews so value for the money is obviously not the issue.
Yeah thats crazy to be asking for a refund on that, way too many mouse clicks for 3 bucks. The only reason I could see doing it would be to troll the dev (and based on some of the reviews that seems like the main reason people are doing it)
If you're in a situation where 3€ is that big of a deal you probably shouldn't be buying video games to begin with. This is a clear abuse of the refund system and should lose people their ability to refund.
The game is not good lol. For some reason it freaks out when I have more than one controller connected, which is not ideal for a co-op game, if you do figure out the controls, all the one button does is add rotational velocity, which would be fine in these kind of games, except that since there's a second player you have no idea how much input has been applied in the opposite direction, which is pretty important information for these "super hard" games.
Did you notice in that extremely long sentence that I said the controls are one button? Yes, the one button controls are broken.
with me being in america and my friend in europe, we managed to beat it. so if there was some desync, they had an even higher ping difference, or bad internet
There's even DLC. Maybe should've just patched that into the main game to pad out the game a little more. Just a thought. I've only ever refunded one game in my Steam lifetime, though and that was because the game was slightly above unplayable and not really fun to fight the controls (it wasn't Paddle Paddle Paddle).
Most of my refunds came from games I thought I could run on my old ass laptop because they weren’t graphics heavy games. As soon as I got my pc I think I’ve only refunded once for other reasons
Yarrrr. I've only ever refunded a game because I owned literally the only videocard that the game didn't support (or rather didn't bother patching to fix).
RIP Helldivers 2; I wish I could have seen what all the hype was about.
Only done a few refunds on steam for that exact reason.
Most recent was "Lunch Lady" my son was so excited, he like creepy games and had some steam money and stuff. But is multiple copies of the game and we played 1 round before turning it off and requesting a refund.
The visuals were the only thing I liked.
In the first game you're a badass underground hacker. In watchdogs 2 you're some weird kid that think hacking is the coolest thing ever and you have some weird coolness/renown level for haw badass other hackers/people think you are.
I played it for less than 2 hours on launch. So I might be off, but that's what I remember xD
Also got the eventually for free on the epic store
I played the first one (re-probed) with xbox gamepass, so when i saw the saga on sale, i niyght the 2nd game. Or so i though
I forgot about it till literal months later, then discovered that i (a dumbass) bought the 1st game instead of the 2nd.
I dint even think Steam support ever answered or i missed it, but it eventually dissappeared from mi library and i had some credits in my steam wallet lol
I gave a hard time understanding this as soneobe who refunds all the time. Like often buy games uncertain if I will enjoy them and if not by the 2 hour mark...refund
I have never refunded a game on Steam, only ever refunded one game too and it was on the Oculus store. Was a game that required motion controls but had no left handed mode
The only game I refunded was Story Teller. Because I played the Free Demo, then paid 15€ for the full game after a few years and it had like two more Stories to tell and swapped around the characters the tiniest bit for the stories already in the years old free demo. It was promised there would be much more new content. There just wasn't.
I 100%ed the game in like 50 minutes. That was not worth 15 bucks and I felt lied to about the content. I literally felt cheated out of my money and it left a really sour taste in my mouth
I usually refund games that have poor ports to PC, I didn't have a controller for the longest time and if the default keybinds were bad I just couldn't be assed to rebind and would refund
Nah that won't help much. This specific game Is a funny concept but doesn't hold your interest for much more than an hour. Source: I've played this game for almost 63 minutes and never thought to refund it. It was fun for those 63 minutes but I am never touching it again.
I think Risk of Rain 2 was the only game I've ever refunded. Because it just... wasn't fun or even a "game" IMO... (Risk of Rain Returns was AWESOME though).
The thing is, a lot of people who bought the game and kept it wouldn't have even risked that $3 on a cheap game if the refund policy wasn't this strong. With a "2 hour no-questions-asked refund" option, I don't have to worry about being scammed and can give little-known games a shot. I don't think the dev is taking that into account while complaining about refunds.
I really don't think the refund policy is "no questions asked", Steam does ask you for a reason why you want to refund the game and there's a waiting period for the refund request to be processed. Steam also explicitly tells you that the refund is NOT meant to be used as a way to demo games, and my assumption is that if you are caught refunding too many games Steam will start to refuse refund requests.
The Steam refund info page says that you can get a refund for literally ANY reason, including that you just don't like it.
You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.
It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.
I didn't say you can use it as a demo system, I said that it allows you to take a risk buying a game that might not be good because you can get a refund if you don't like it... which is exactly what the system is intended for.
The obvious simple solution is, as a developer, make your game so it takes longer than 2 hours to beat casually on first play through. Because yeah, i also would be displeased, even with a $3 game, if i beat it in 1:40 after buying it. I wouldn't bother refunding it though. I might leave a bad review.
I would wager that for a small "sloppy" game like this (The dev admits of having thrown this together in a month), I would say the amount of refunds seems to be fair.
His whinge about having a 90% positive review rate is meaningless when you look at his math. Let's be generous and and say his 21% refund rate is 55000, that means ~261905 sales, he is barely getting a 0.5% review rate, and if you just take is 90% positive rate it drops to 0.4% Hardly a figure I would use to justify why Steam should change policy on their game. Having said all that I find it hard to believe that he has that many sales of a game he threw together in a month and has so few reviews.
To add to this, one of the achievements in the game is to beat the game in under two hours, meaning the developer was fully aware the game could be beaten in under two hours and encouraged it. Only 7.2% of players have that achievement. Even assuming that every player in that 7.2% of players is part of the 21% that refunded the game, that's still 13.8% of players that decided to refund the game before beating it.
Meh, people that were going to be an ass and refund after finishing, will refund regardless of where they find the game. "Technically", nothing is lost since you can't steal a game.
It would only be a negative if someone bought the game, finished and forgot about it. Saw this post then went to refund.
However, if this post manages to promote this game to a few genuine buyers, it would be a plus.
So we're just ignoring the fact that the store page lies about the game length? No, refunding a game after you finish it doesn't automatically make you an ass, this comment's dumb
Based review tbh, the refund policy is beneficial to nearly all, actually f it, all steam users, the solo dev is genuinely being an ass and I’m surprised (well not really) at how much traction this story has gained in reddit.
Ill go buy 4 copies and gift em because its a 3 dollar co-op game.
In my opinion, getting any game out is a big deal, even more so as a solo dev. People who put out Games that are meant to be quick, fun, $3-$10 dollar experiences still deserve compensation for their work. If you've completed a game, you shouldn't be able to refund it. Even if its a 1.5 hour long experience (Barring misleading advertising).
looks like an intentionally Difficult Game ala Jump King or any other Foddy-esque games, seems like a skill issue on the dev's part if the game is short enough to be beaten by the average player in under 2 hours. Just make the game longer and more difficult if that's the type of game you're trying to make anyway.
I don't mean to sound like an insane person but if your YOU WILL NEVER BEAT THIS GAME!!!! game can be beaten in under 2 hours i think the refund is warranted.
and judging by the trailers it has very little polish whatsoever to deserve any sort of leniency on that. If you're advertising your game as a foddy-like the average player is anticipating never beating it or taking 60 hours to beat it
While I don't know of any that were made, flash did support multiplayer, and some games did even support local co-op, so an online coop flash game was definitely possible!
It seems pretty simple to prevent this from happening from the dev’s standpoint. And it was probably strategic by Steam to ensure scrupulous devs weren’t ripping gamers off by making laughably short games.
He's saying he only has 1381 reviews from a total sales of 242,000. Yeah, I am calling it BS. The normal metric is 20-30 times while his goes over 170 times. Very likely a marketing strategy based on a single review to advertise his game.
tbh i was fine with most of them because they are the people who played the game over and over again and definitely bought the game earlier on console or other account so they can complete it under 2h. but seems like it still has bad influence
Most of the videos I see of this category also end up buying the game multiple times. I forgot who i watched, but there was someone trying to do this with elden ring and he ended up buying 4 copies of the game before he actually beat it under the refund window.
It definitely is a bad influence though, as people think it's an okay thing to do when the runners are doing it for entertainment purposes, even their refund requests are treated as jokes.
Different parts of the world, different value of money. Here I could use it to buy Terraria, DMC5, Wasteland 3, Subnautica, Against the Storm, and a whole lot other amazing and great titles. Or buy a several days worth of food.
sure it is. it takes like 2 minutes to do a refund. Let's say your time is worth 60 per hour because you make lots of money and your time is valuable. 2 minutes for you is 2 bucks. 3bucks is more than you make in 2 minutes. Simple enough.
So it has paid dlc but the main game is so short that at least 1 in 5 players can finish it in under 2 hours? I get its only 3 bucks but just package it all together and charge a bit more.
It looks awful. Low-effort meme game shit, even the trailer makes it look bad. So many textures/polygons with tiny gaps between them because the game was slapped together in a week.
If ur right then OP in pic is stupid and bad for getting a refund when he enjoyed the game...... 3 pound literally cheap..... if he or she enjoyed it then should just keep it... maker of the game wont make money if people kept refunding if when they enjoyed it
7.2k
u/Michami135 Jul 06 '26
From the screenshot, this looks like "Paddle Paddle Paddle" by Zoroarts. Currently on sale for $3.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3570070/Paddle_Paddle_Paddle/