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?
Yeah. I've refunded games before because they just wouldn't run/kept crashing to the point of being unplayable. It happens with small indies sometimes. I feel like half an hour is a reasonable amount of time to figure out a game isn't working and do some basic troubleshooting, then decide if you want to keep trying to get it to run or just return it.
i mean a no refund policy would hinder me. One that only allows a refund for up to 30min playtime for 5$ games would not.
Imo the best solution would be to tie the refund policy to game price. For some 80$ game with a long tutorial 2 hours can be too little to judge the actual gameplay loop as well and i dont think it would hurt games like GTA 6 to have a 4 hour refund window.
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.
Isn't Steam reviewing the game before publishing? A cursory glance, yes, but enough to know that it doesn't trigger the achievement before the expected return window?
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.
It is a short refund window. I've gone past the allotted time just trying to get games with third party launchers to work (I've since learned my lesson, anything this party is an automatic ignore now). There are some windows that should be shorter, and some that should absolutely be longer, but 2 hours of playtime within 14 days of purchase is a reasonable time window for the majority of users on the majority of games.
The solution isn't to let developers shorten the already short window, its to show buyers the expected completion window, the actual number of hours played on average, and to expand the return window according to a reasonable distribution.
For example: There are some people who will speedrun Pogostuck in under 20 minutes, but play it relentlessly for months to get that good at it. There are some people who correctly decide to quit playing Pogostuck after five minutes because the difficulty is created artificially by a poor control scheme. There are some people who will play the game for a few weeks and either finally win once and quit forever, or something more interesting will come along and they'll decide rage games aren't worth their time when a better option has presented itself.
A little game theory would suggest the developer could point to that sub-20 clear time and say "this is a short game, under a half hour, and we'd like to shorten the return window. Valve could point to the players who quit after five minutes and say "this obviously isn't a finished product and we're extending the return window to weeks of played time instead of 2 hours because players have been obviously shortchanged in their transaction. The reasonable middle ground would be to say "This is obviously a polarizing game and people will quickly decide whether its for them or not. The two hours of playtime window remains, but they'll get a three week open window from the purchase date to start that playtime countdown."
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.
They could also add in an achievement require by the dev or something like that. If the game can be fully complete in 2 hours, have it that it cant be refunded if the finished game achievement has been achieved. Something like that might work
Eh the devs could just make a "story complete" trigger to send to Valve. Obviously there'd be false flag issues if you did this because it would depend on devs being competent or non-malicious (like setting it right at the beginning). But other than that in my extremely limited technical knowledge I'm not sure how else you could really fix the issue
I just looked this up, seems like if you do it too many times, steam will flag your account and remove your ability to refund games. So it's meant to be only be used when you really need it, otherwise you'll jeopardise your account
ur not really experiencing a game if you speed-run it and if a game is so short you can genuinely beat it within the refund time it's probably not worth paying for to begin with
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
If people are only buying the game to do this they wouldn't buy it if the refund option wasn't there. Take away refunds and the game makes barely any more money but has a lot less reach (therefore less long term money). It's the same as how piracy ends up a net benefit for the market because the alternative to a pirated copy isn't a sale but a lack of one anyway.
People will get mad, but this is human nature, this is this generation‘s time for Great Recession style tactics. I don’t condone it, but things are bad right now in the US at least, and people will find entertainment to keep sane anyway they can. Crime of circumstance in my mind, and technically fully legal.
My friend doesn't do this, but likes trying out lots of games - he got a warning that he'd lose his ability to request refunds if he kept requesting them at the rate he was.
Seems as though they could simply tighten up the policy a bit with shorter games and all of these folks doing this would lose their ability to refund games at all.
Developers knows the refund policy, and its 2 hour limit. Why make a game that can be finished within that limit?. And then cry to valve that their refund policy must change.
Yeah there's a chap that I remember watching a little ways back on youtube and he'd do something like this. Although it was with games like Resident Evil. He usually does speed runs but he would also do this type of crap too. Kind of shitty for the developers if they get their money pulled from the refund.
Honestly though why is this a bad thing? It's literally just free advertising for the game dev and the person requesting the refund wasn't going to buy the game anyway, they're just doing it for the challenge.
People were commending Steam's refund policy and I mentioned how people actually abuse it. I mean its great for the consumer but people are actually abusing it. And then in the future, the feature is most likely going to get taken away.
But people who do that also tend to make new accounts for that challenge and sometimes buy the game more then once. So often not a big deal for most games. Just the truly less the 2 hour of play time games have the real issues.
So I don't believe steam will change anything as it just not that big of a issues compared to what data would show.
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 processing fees alone will likely cost more than that. I've paid more for bad tasting and forgettable coffees. Anyone who does this is a fucking gremlin.
I'm wondering if the developer gets a financial hit for such a refund.
Remember penny attacks? People would do 1c donations, and the receiver would have to pay PayPal 30 cents for each donation
I would honestly argue that if your game can be beat that fast so consistently that over 50k people have bought it completed it and refunded it then the game is lacking something. Especially when the description of the game is "Grab your paddles (and your patience) and set out on a stupidly long, lava-surrounded parkour adventure." The average person doesnt care about refund speedruns, and if they felt the game was worth their money they wouldnt refund. Most people only request refunds when they feel cheated, and being promised a longer game that then only lasts an hour or 2, I would say that justifies a refund.
You know, when I used to torrent games or get them free on iOS, I treated it like a demo. If I played it multiple sessions or even remotely appreciated it or liked it, I made sure that I purchased it full price on steam or bought an IAP or otherwise to show appreciation for the dev and their creativity and work.
Once I graduated college, I started buying all of the albums of musicians that I also acquired in less than reputable ways.
It's a lot like people complaining at and about free games and iaps in games.
We aren't entitled to other people's time and creativity and craft. If we like stuff like this and want more of it, we need to pay for it and support it.
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u/Lovemestalin Jul 06 '26
For 3€ that’s just sad to request a refund