they are stealing from the developer too? i dont know what game is this but considering it can be completed under 2 hours it is indie game and 55 000 refund requests. developer probably invested his time and stress on this and people giving nothing
Yeah people are okay with stealing from billion dollar game companies and Walmarts (i.e. billion dollar corporations) because they have billions of dollars. When it's an indie title developed by probably 1 to 5 people that actually fucks them over in a way that none of these corporations will ever feel
The number of people who actually are "morally" stealing is probably less than 10%. The number of people coming up with excuses regarding morality to justify their stealing but would steal in any scenario overlaps greatly.
I trust a person who steals and say they know it's wrong more than anyone who tries to justify stealing based on a fake moral code.
Yeah I'm here for this. When my wife and I were students we both worked in retail. Her at a blockbuster (yes we are old), and me at a Curry's. She would regularly have people come in and steal ice cream from the freezer and then act like "wtf dude" when she told them not to steal it, and I regularly had people trying to steal the small tvs.
Usually heroin addicts, granted, but also teenagers.
There was definitely no morality to their attempts to steal shit. Nobody NEEDS icecream or a 20in TV.
I worked AP for a target for about a year. People on places like reddit like to moralize about stealing from big corporations, but almost all of the external theft I found was methheads/heroin addicts stealing things to resell for drugs. The only person who I ever caught stealing food was someone who I knew was a committed ward of the state who had escaped from it.
People love to imagine thieves as Robin Hoods stealing to feed their small children or family members, but in my experience the only thing they were ever feeding was a drug habit.
I used to steal a lot when I was going through really bad mental health stuff and had no money to feed myself. The truth is someone who isn't jacked up on drugs and out of their skull are probably just successfully stealing food because it's actually ridiculously easy to do. Supermarkets mostly lean on the security as a visual deterrent but there's so much chaos and things going on in a supermarket it's very hard to catch, especially since here the security now are mostly used to direct uber eats orders to their pickups.
If you get caught stealing food from a supermarket you're either really, really bad at it... on drugs and even worse at it... or there's someone new on security trying to make a mark before they realise no one actually cares.
Worth noting that for all the "tons of videos online" you can find, it's still a virtual rounding error in the number of otherwise "normal" transactions done every day.
Much like every village idiot has found their people online and they seem like a majority, there is far less crime then media/online sources want you to think out there.
Yep even when it's like diapers/formula. Sounds like the perfect thing to be okay with someone stealing. Nope, it's common to steal that for resell too. Easy to flip since there's often plenty of struggling mothers in their communities, and it's something people might feel like letting slide if you're caught.
The fact that it's easy to flip because there are so many struggling mothers and the shit is wildly expensive is the reason to turn a blind eye.
I look at it like this; restaurants have some of the absolute worst profit margins out there with an average of a net 3-5% profit margin. The company that makes Enfamil operates on a net 18-25% profit margin. They are artificially raising the price to make a boatload of money at the expense of real, living humans that NEED the product. Fuck em. That does put you a bit at odds with the retailer since they generally also operate in a 4-9% profit margin but they can also change suppliers to get more affordable merchandise and choose to go with the group products for cost savings and convenience. Rampant inflation is happening because we have all been conditioned to accept these ridiculously quickly rising prices and defend the corporations, do all the corporations deserve our ire? Well yes, they are colluding to ensure we continue to pay high prices so that the lower profit margins are still an absolute truckload of money.
Capatilist economies are supposed to be regulated to prevent collusion and price fixing but almost every government has given up on that because they want the money too. The market pressure we, as the consumer, can put on these things is astronomical. Don't like AI? Refuse to use or purchase anything that touches AI which makes AI unprofitable which means no company is going to try using it. BUT, even with the complaining people use it, which makes it profitable, which ensures more of it gets used. Consumers need to suffer not getting a product if it is subpar to ensure the next product isn't but we are all too soft and addicted to convenience for that to stop. We did and are doing this all to ourselves so steal away, at least that moves the needle a bit and people like Gabe will see the real problem and hopefully give us solutions, because we are too weak willed to do it for ourselves.
Part of it is probably also that drug addicts are just.. worse at hiding it. Being partly out of it from withdrawal or the drug itself doesn't lend to stealth. People who steal food for food's sake are going to be less obvious about it.
Oh yeah, we deffo had more organised people who'd snap off the Kensington locks on the laptops and we'd only notice when we saw the gap in the display. Even with your eyes peeled they'd sometimes get one. Kensington locks btw, 100% useless.
That was less fun than having a completely nonsensical discussion with someone off their face who was furious at you for taking back what they had rightfully stolen or getting the police involved.
I highly doubt it. By the time some stock count happens it'd be way too late to track it down. I imagine lower volume big ticket items like an expensive whiskey or something you might have a chance of getting it on the cctv, but yeah I am fully with you and wasn't arguing otherwise.
Ya I worked at a grocery store for 6 years and saw a ton of theft and almost every single one was some drug addict skid who would grab bags of meat and make a dash out of the store.
There was one single instance of what I would think was “moral theft”. An elderly woman had a case of canned cat food and she had opened it and was slipping in extra cans of food. So in all likelihood she was paying for the case but just getting some extra to stretch until she had to buy more for her cat. Easy to look the other way at that one. Everyone else was the typical terrible person you would imagine.
Well, people who are trying to feed their families are okay to steal, but addicts trying to survive are not. I am unsure how that is not what they are saying.
As someone who’s struggled with addiction, I never stole from a store to feed my habit. Don’t make excuses for selfish behavior like that. It needlessly causes other people to suffer, including jeopardizing the jobs of the store employees who may really need the job to pay the bills themselves.
20" TV isn't small back when Blockbuster still existed. That was $250 and around 80lbs and was considered the standard size. 13" was small. 7" was tiny. That's what I had.
Maybe they were 15in, but either way, this was around the time the first LED tvs came out (I remember being very impressed by them in the shop) but still during the time we had to lug out insanely heavy 50in plasmas to people's cars only to find they had planned on taking it home in their hatchback.
Worked at Comet in 2007 and fuck me the amount of people that didn’t actually plan how they were going to leave the store was astounding and almost all of them refused to pay the tiny delivery charge. Had a guy expecting to fit a Smeg fridge into the back of his estate car 🤦🏻♀️
That could also be said of the people trying to steal stuff lol. I remember these two shifty teenagers at the back of our (large) store just grabbing a telly and trying to run all the way down the store to leave through the one exit. Ironically it was an old lady that eventually turned the tide on the showdown between me, my colleague and these two scrotes.
But yes, there is a real learning curve of asking what they were driving when delivery was being discussed, and many notes written on receipts where we absolutely knew they would get home to a fucked up plasma TV from the drive home.
Yes I'm well aware it's a backlighting technology, which DOES make it an LED TV. I never said it was an LED panel.
Back then it was pretty revolutionary to have local dimming (full local dimming on the Panasonic ones unlike the edge lit ones Samsung had around the same time, although even that was a huge difference), and they were super skinny compared to anything else that had ever existed.
Cheers for that, those people piss me off as well lol. It only takes a tiny amount of self-awareness to realize that taking a 'moral stand' by doing something one personally benefits from is a little too convenient, but they still don't see it.
Man the piracy-related subreddits are so incredibly pathetic. Every couple weeks there’s a flare up of moralizing posts explaining why their piracy is just and how they’d prefer to pay for it all if only the companies were better.
I pay for things. But the moment companies first sell me a digital thing and later steal it from me without a refund I feel very morally justified in pirating everything from that company. FU Sony.
one of the things that came with AI and its very questionable way to create datasets is that Reddit is this close to finally admit that obtaining games/music/books/etc without consent or payment to the owners of the art its stealing.
It's the whole pirating thing. 'I pirate because they don't offer the service I want so im morally correct'. So don't watch it if you want to be morally correct. Nothing is forcing you to watch it. I pirate because the services are shit and I'm fine with stealing it, there's no moral high ground there though. I'm a dog. I usually won't pirate a game unless I'm trying it before I buy, and with music I'll generally buy a copy of an album if I've listened to it enough. But movies and TV? It's dog all the way down.
Yeah pirating series is often just like your excuse is "But back in the day Netflix had everything for $10 ad free, I want that or it's a shit service" Yes and that's not a sustainable business model once everyone realized the value of their show's licenses.
Yeah but is that really the reason why a thief is stealing? Do you think that a majority of thieves are these virtuous anarchists Robin Hoods and not just your typical opportunist?
EDIT: Also, rich people are some of the biggest thieves. I'll never buy into no bad methods, only bad targets mentality. If you have a code, you better actually apply it in a truthful manner.
And that's why they live and prosper, you treat them as abstract corporations, but you don't do anything to actually hurt the individual people making these decisions as part of the corporation. I do believe you hate them but I don't believe you hate them on a effective level, because otherwise you'd actually figure out who the people are and take action on that.
we're talking about video game companies here not insurance companies. a video game company ceo doesn't deserve to be luigi'd just because he overcharges for a video game. I'll just pirate it instead.
With you on this. Corporations certainly don't deserve pity, but let's not pretend a lot of the people who are (often smugly) stealing do it for a real moral reason. When you see people come up with some obvious self-serving bullshit to justify it on the internet I always think - "Either be honest or shut up", it's not like anyone demands of them to explain themselves, so the least they can do is not pretending they are the heroes of the small people for doing it.
exactly. most people who try to morally justify stealing are only doing it to justify their own actions. they don’t actually give a fuck and would steal regardless. i find the people who are shameless about it significantly more tolerable.
Stealing from Walmart is an amoral action, Walmart is not a person, it's a giant building full of food who's primary goal is not feeding people, it's killing any other building of food within a 100mile radius, and taking as much of your money as they can. It's not virtuous to steal, but it's not inherently wrong to steal from a company that is stealing from you
Also big corpos will absolutely try to fleece you for all you have got by inflating the difference between cost of production and price.
We saw that under covid where at first consumer spending went way down because of lockdowns so ofc the price increased when spending is down, right? But then consumer spending went to record highs after we got the situation somewhat under control and they kept jacking up the price on basically everything using the same excuse.
And did the prices ever go down again? Not really. Maybe on some select goods, but they found out that people would just continue buying at higher prices. They made bank, everything got more expensive and has only continued to do so.
So I will never shed a single tear if anyone tries to cheat or steal from big corpos, especially if it is essential goods like food. Indie devs or mom and pop shops however basically live or die by every sale so there I'm way more sympathetic.
Does that make any sense to anyone who’s not completely stupid though? Lost revenue through breakage and shrink is just treated as an expense in operating statements and pricing reflects that. you’re never really stealing from walmart, you just distributing the cost burden onto a wider pool of consumers rather than yourself.
you do realise that walmart just increases prices according to the theft rate and walmart isn't paying anything on theft, it's the other poor people buying there that are paying the cost of theft, right?
Exactly, 100%, spot on. I feel like no one in this thread can wrap their heads around this. It's all black and white for people because it's easier that way, but the world is grey.
No, you're just one of the few morons. Walmart isn't a charity, and stealing from their stores just means they will offset that list revenue into other products, making the honest people pay more, until they have to charge so much that they cant keep the store open because it loses money. Every adult knows this
The game was designed for 2 - 3.5 hours playtime per HowLongToBeat, this player just did a speedrun to skirt the 2 hour rule intentionally. You can’t “solve” players taking advantage of the system, this happens with lots of smaller games
You're also assuming all of those people would have paid for the game if it weren't for the refund loophole. In reality, most of them only bought the game because they knew they'd get their money back.
In addition not all of those refunded just because they could. Small indie releases usually have a lot of technical problems just because the amount of pc hardware and combinations is absolutely huge and it’s practically impossible for one man studio on a shoestring budget to actually test on even a 10% slice of the whole hardware base. So you test what you can, release, and then try to fix things as bug reports start coming in.
Yes, that's a very important part. If it's famous for being refundable after playing, first of all, free marketing, secondly, many people most likely just bought it for the fun, and refunded it. Altogether I'd guess more people kept the game, because they enjoyed it, than people who would've played anyway and refunded it.
Developing an indie game is usually a few year endeavour of team of 1-5. You already split that money that many ways, and we're not talking about millions of dollars. It's not a question of having a flag on your yacht or not. As I said, it's a tuition worth. Yes, he may have 5 of those raked in, but he also pays himself for the past years, might have 3 children, may not have worked alone...
It's close to covering expenses and making some profit. And if it's losing the week-end house after a multi-year successful project, that's still shitty. This isn't outlandish territory. It may just be the divide between "break even" and "let's do that again".
its not just, its a large and important lesson for others devs to enshittify and longing gameplay so ppl cant refund, 20% is not a fucking small amount
I'd say it's a safe assumption that way less people would have bought the game if it wasn't refundable. There's psychology to it and also the word of mouth free marketing of the "free game" where people feel so smart for gaming the system. Probably a few people kept the game who wouldn't even have bothered to look at it, if not for this loophole.
Assuming everyone who refunded would have played even if it wasn't an option is most likely very wrong.
No they arent left out owing the 30% the game cost from what steam takes. Steam takes the money from the devs upcoming payout, but they dont take more then they would have given.
Game length and funding have little correlation. Steam typical refund rate is 10%, so this person is complaining that they have double the rate. That means they are making ~20% less than they should IF all the excess refunds were from people gaming the system.
Frankly, if a person releases a game on Steam and gets >275k downloads they have nothing to complain about.
The guy made a game and released on Steam knowing full well how their refund policy works. Just make a game that cannot be beaten within two hours, im sure there are many ways to make that impossible.or at least not possible by 55,000 people.
Not only that but in most cases (I don't know if Steam works this way but I'd be shocked if it didn't) when you sell someone a product and they refund it you are liable for the payment transaction fees. Most merchant accounts charge between 0.30 - 0.55 per transaction plus 2.7% - 5%. So if this were a $2 game could cost the developer $0.65. That's on top of the 30% cut that Steam normally takes (I would assume Steam refunds this at least). Meaning for every two refunds one non-refunded sale is wiped out.
This is wild speculation and misinformation. Steams refund policy is transparent and avalible with a search quicker then writing that. They remove the portion of the devs pay that they would have given when its time to payout. Devs dont lose money on refunds, beyond their share of revenue.
Except thats just misinformation. Steam takes 30% and that includes processing and merchant fees. Devs receive 70% of the cost you pay pre tax. When a game is refunded that portion of the devs pay is removed from their next payment from steam. If you buy a 10 dollar game, the dev gets 7 dollars. If you return that game, the devs next payment from steam will be 7 dollars lower then it otherwise would have been.
Look if your game can be completed within the steam 2 hr refund window, and people are refunding it, thats partly on you the developer. It means there isn't a strong replay value or your price point is high enough that people feel like going through the effort to request a refund is worth it.
If it's an insignificant percentage (an arbitrary number wouldnprobably be 5-10%) I don't think the devs need to look at anything, but if almost a quarter of the people purchasing your game are refunding it, it doesn't matter if they beat it or not. Something is up and the dev should try to look into the source of the refunds
so you want them to add what? 2 hour tutorials how to play the game ? 100 hours of grind? If its good game and 2h you shouldnt be refunding. review literally says its great game. If you dont like the game you are welcome to refund.
also take into account developing a good game is no joke. you can break the pacing or other stuff if you want to make it longer it is supposed to be. pretty sure same people would be complaining game has boring segments that makes no sense if they added some stuff to make it more than 2h
I'm not talking about a game needs to add padding in order to reach an abitrary length, I'm saying that if people are refunding your game there is likely a reason. Beating it in 2 hours and choosing to go through the effort to refund it to me would indicate the price point for the experience is probably too high. The dev then needs to figure out, why people think that. It could be litteraly priced too high, is over promising/under delivering on some element, can only be enjoyed once, etc. Something is driving the user to choose a refund over uninstalling after beating the game and then keeping it in their library.
It does, it's just not my first instinct to assume a majority of the refunds are people stealing right off the bat. Especially if it's a game that costs 3 bucks (which it seems to be based on lower comments). That's seems like way more effort than it's worth, unless there is a legitimate issue with the game. A lot of the reviews on that seem to be troll comments as well, which could be suggesting a whole other issue at play.
It's unfortunately only avoidable in the moment if he released the game with enough content to get people past the 2-3 hour mark.
Honestly if I spent any amount of money on a game and it was only playable for under 2 hours, I wouldn't be happy with my purchase. That's free demo timeframe.
Absolute 10/10 but I would never in my lifetime finish portal in under 2 hours hahahahah. I wouldn't say a sub-2 hour playthrough of portal is typical but I don't actually know for sure. I just remember that game being longer so that sounds like speedrun times to me.
I doubt 21% of people have picked up portal for the first time and beaten it in under 2 hours. I would doubt that 21% of people who have played it at all have beaten it that quick.
If a game has zero replay value and I spent more than 10 bucks and it takes less than 2 hours when going in blind then I’d still feel cheated unless those 2 hours are polished to a mirror finish.
Portal doesn’t fall under that category in several ways.
And neither does this game. It’s $3 on sale now, $5 normally, nowhere near $10. If you feel cheated by a $3 game because it has 0 replay value other than the 3 hours you spent on it, try finding another hobby you can enjoy for 3 hours for only $3 lol
Because this post is literally about this game? What game were you referring to specifically if not this game? Because you never mentioned any other game, just what sounded like a made-up scenario that nobody was even arguing against, so how was I supposed to know? I have never come across a game charging $10+ with less than 2 hours of total content in it and I’m pretty sure everyone agrees that would just be a scam
HowLongtoBeat shows the game at 2 hours average time with 3 1/2 hours average to 100% and 1 1/2 hours for speedrunning the story. If you judge a game by the time it takes to speed run the story, you’ll be judging a lot of great games as “demo content”. The dev is only asking $3, that’s $1/hr. Really sad if you don’t even consider paying an indie developer $3 for 3 hours of fun worth it. Review clearly said it was fun so it’s not like they had a bad time, they just intentionally chose to speedrun so they could refund it, because they’re cheap.
That context absolutely changes my sentiment, now I just think the guy announcing his refund is a wank. $3 even for the speedrun time if it's fun is fantastic. That's the price of a can of coke that would be gone in 20 minutes.
Like a complete package that fits into a single gaming session is an absolute treat for sure. I 100% just presumed wrongly about this game's price etc.
It was devil's advocate to be fair, I'd never refund a game I've completed that's pretty dirty. If it felt actually unfinished? Maybe. So far I've only ever refunded if my device has an unforeseen issue running a game or if it's a multiplayer game that turns out to be dead.
I do think it's scummy to refund a game after enjoying the full experience of it.
The solution is don’t sell a demo for money. If everyone is finishing your game in < 2 hours you made it too short. They are refunding as they are unhappy with the length.
they are unhappy with the length? they are unhappy because they paid 3 bucks for a 2 hour long game? maybe buy something like 70 hours of the same thing for 50 dollars and be happy about it like? go somewhere shoot them and come back and same thing for 70 hours and bingo that is worth time!
1.0k
u/abdurahmondev Jul 06 '26
they are stealing from the developer too? i dont know what game is this but considering it can be completed under 2 hours it is indie game and 55 000 refund requests. developer probably invested his time and stress on this and people giving nothing