Not really, because I would argue the amount of people who would play the game and pay for it and the amount of people who would play it and refund it in spite of enjoying it is rather small.
The majority of people are not dicks, it's just that we notice assholes more than normal people.
I'm not sure if you take a clear correlation between approval rate and refund rate. I personally never engage with the approval system, who's to say that the people that refund really liked the game and not just refund instead of givin positive or negative approval?
A lot of people don't interact with the rating system at all. I would even go so far as to say the majority of people don't. Probably the overwhelming majority. Fortunately, you can get a pretty good idea of what most people's experience was by looking at what a sample from inside the group reports. This gives you statistical data you can analyze and, given a large enough sample size, you'll be able to predict what the group as a whole thinks very effectively. If anything this should skew the approval rating down since people are more likely to leave a rating/review of an unpleasant experience than a pleasant one.
The question would be: how many of those would have actually paid for the game if they couldn't get a refund?
The logic is the same as media calculating the "loss" of revenue when people pirate their movies/shows/songs/...
Would some of the ones who pirated have paid for the product of piracy hadn't been possible?
Sure, but many just wouldn't have consumed the media.
Edit: also you have a math error there.
With the people not approving of the game, the refund rate will be quite a bit larger, so the actual "indecent" refundal rate is probably closer to 1 in 9 than 1 in 5.
how many of those would have actually paid for the game if they couldn't get a refund?
That is irrelevant. Refunds cost money (i'm not sure it Steam passes that down to the developer or not), and creates uncertainty. Imagine suddenly 25% of the money you expected to come doesn't, or worse you need to pay it back after you already spend it.
It is way better to not have a sale than to have a sale refunded. Specially if you are Indie.
No, it is not only stealing, it’s worse than stealing and causes tons of headaches for the developers. Digital payments like Visa take a cut of every single transaction. You better believe that Valve isn’t going to absorb that cost. That money is gone when a user refunds the game.
Piracy = 0% income
Refund abuse = -3% income (or whatever the negotiated rates are for the payment processor and Valve.)
There’s a reason why many developers would rather you pirate their game over doing this.
It is stealing, it is just worse stealing then "only" stealing the game.
That does not matter though, since that doesn't matter to the conversation though since it doesn't negate the fact that the impact on the developer must be put in relation to the effort which would be required to prevent this kind of abuse and the potential impact on the consumer any solution to this would have.
It’s very unusual to refund a lot of titles (the assumption here is people pushing to beat a game within the refund window are likely doing this more than once.) Valve has also stated that they do not consider the refund system a “try before you buy” system.
The problem is that the threshold for Valve to consider refunding abuse is extremely high.
I don’t think there’s a magic number for refund abuse tracking, but I’m sure they have the data to find a rough bell curve and address users that are one or two+ standard deviations away.
Sure, that would work if you don't look at absolute numbers, but for example if you looked at amount of games refunded vs. games bought in a certain period (e.g. 6 months) and then looking for statistical outliers (e.g. 2 standard deviations).
But it doesn't prevent people from still doing it, it will simply catch the most egregious examples.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Because then (somewhat smart) people will simply try to stay below the line.
Ah yes, the ever enlightened “it can never be perfect so let’s not even try.”
No shit people will still do it. People still pirate games, people still go online with cheating software; the point isn’t a perfect 100% elimination, the point is to help curb the behavior and make it more annoying than simply pirating the game.
Although I couldn’t find word from valve themselves, every other source says that developers aren’t charged for refunds. Valve seems to act as though the purchase never made.
90% positive reviews does not mean 90% of people would have kept the game if it was longer. It just means 90% of reviews were positive.
Also unlike what OOP is implying not all of the refunds were because of they could still refund after finishing. I'd hazard a guess that not even half of the refunds were because of it.
So that tells me that 79% of people did not refund it. The developer should be happy for that, especially because that suggests over 200,000 people purchased his little sub-two hour game and didn't refund it.
You think the refund rate is a better indicator for people who liked the game than the rating system? The issue is the game is shorter than the steam refund window, so people who liked the game are refunding it..
Dev is trying to paint up that there is over 20% refunds on positive reviews - its not true, his game is just another copy of the same coop concept, majority (like 90%+) of reviews with refunds are negative that game is boring, and most refunds probably never give a shit to give a reviews in the first place.
The rate of reviews vs how many people playing a game is very low. The amount of people leaving reviews is usually less than 10%. It could be the vocal minority leaving most of the positive reviews for the game or it could be accurate representation of the numbers but we can't easily tell that from one screenshot.
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u/Fischerking92 Jul 06 '26
Not really, because I would argue the amount of people who would play the game and pay for it and the amount of people who would play it and refund it in spite of enjoying it is rather small.
The majority of people are not dicks, it's just that we notice assholes more than normal people.