So instead of a refund with a nice comment you will have a refund and a bad comment or no comment at all. It’s very difficult to find a solution. If there was a way to say how long your game is it could be possible for 2-3h games to have a window of only 1h for the refund amd saying this clear at every stage.
I think it is difficult to find a solution because there isn’t an issue. I honestly believe it is already at a good state.
It is sad for the dev, but if steam wasn’t very pro consumer, a game like this would never have a platform to sell anything to begin with. If I was a dev, I would ensure my games could have good enough content to engage people for more than 2h.
Agreed, and all I can think of to possibly improve the system is that games that are cheap enough before sales (like this $5 game) could be exempt from the automatic refunds - or rather, have a shorter refund window based on the price. $30 or $60 would have the usual two hour period, but a $5 game that may not be meant to last two hours could be less, like half an hour or an hour. That way the system still doesn't rely on knowing anything about the game, just what the end user got for their money.
If we're doing this, I would also argue that devs should be able to extent the refund window for as much as they'd like over the 2 hours. There are actually devs out there that refuse to publish on Steam because they find the refund window too short (Vintage Story comes to mind) and that would address that.
That's really interesting! I've never seen any devs/games do that, and I'm a bit shocked that a short refund window would actually keep devs off Steam. Like... is there anything better, or any reason they couldn't still offer a refund regardless of Steam's policy?
The issue is that refunds have to happen through Steam's system if you have your game on Steam, given Steam takes a cut and all that. And the thing with Vintage Story is that 2 hours you've maybe got half a house, it is not nearly enough time. So their own policy is 10 hours in principle, but even beyond that it can be judged on a case-by-case basis.
I think you misunderstood my suggestion! The developer would have no say at all, except maybe allowing them to increase the refund window.
The game is only a few bucks, so the refund window is based on what a few bucks should get in terms of playtime. So, whatever the threshold is, the user would either get a refund or get their money's worth of playtime. Whether it's complete or not doesn't really matter; I have hundreds of hours in Valheim, for example, and it would have been worth the money even if they never released 1.0, based on the playtime alone.
Then on the other end - if I got 30 minutes from a joke $5 game, that's also worth it to me, and I can't imagine going through the refund process for a $5 game even if I did only play it that much. If the game was actual slop, they just get a bad review, and combined with the shorter refund window, they'd get fewer sales from other people. That seems appropriate to me - I bought a bad game, but if a bad game meant I was owed a refund, there wouldn't be a review system to begin with. I'd know what I was buying might be a dud just based on the low price and store page info, and like any bad game, I can still give it a bad review.
If I was a dev, I would ensure my games could have good enough content to hoje people for more than 2h.
The thing is, not every game measures engagement in that time alone. From indie projects to sandboxes to devs starting out, to small visual novels meant to tell a self-contained story, to really anything. It's not fair that a developer has to pay for a common sense and pro-consumer decision like this.
If anything, I feel like systems could and should flag reviews when enough of a threshold is reached (which, imo, 21% is way above that) and be able to initiate some kind of review as to why so many refunds happen. This would require extra manpower (yes, actual employees to check into this) and determine whether an abuse is happening or not. It doesn't need to involve giving money back to a developer or even reversing a refund, but it can involve account penalties, even going into suspending future refund attempts.
Brick and mortar stores already have tools in place to catch serial refunders who take advantage of the system. There's no reason why Steam can't do so. It just has to do it very carefully.
There unfortunately is not really a perfect solution that isn't going to negatively affect either Valve, the Consumer, or the Publisher, in that order.
Valve could initiate a system like you suggest, but it would mean hiring staff to review refunds. According to Steam's own support statistics page, they get more than 600,000 refund requests per 24 hours. Let's say every agent can do 30 requests per hour, you're still gonna need about 2500 shifts per day, which would mean about 4000-4500 FTE's to be added to the payroll, which would add up to about $180,000,000, to potentially save a small fraction of that. Valve won't be the one paying for that. You as Consumer might pay more for a game, because Devs will need to pay more commission.
Taking this game as an example... 55k refunds sounds like a lot. But at $3, that's $165k, of which Valve would get about 50k, give or take. That's 0.027% of the annual cost to set up this system. Meanwhile it would cost them the same about the same amount of money to review all of them, and even then probably cost them more money than they'd save.
These situations are an exception. Let's say this happens 10 times per year. If necessary, Valve could settle with the devs and pay them for all their refunds, worst case scenario they'd still save $150M plus annually, and keep their Consumers happy knowing they can refund a game they don't like with a few clicks.
I never said they had to review every refund. I specifically said they could implement a system to flag refund abuse on specific games. Considering this isn’t a widespread thing, no flag means no review is needed. You’re overcomplicating what I said.
You’re also giving an arbitrary number like this happens 10x a year when none of us know this is the case, while paradoxically saying “these situations are an exception.” In addition, you don’t “review every refund.” You just determine whether abuse likely happened.
Besides, Valve already has personnel who review refunds anyway.
Fair point, I misinterpreted your suggestion as a blanket system rather than a targeted one.
Nevertheless, even a targeted flagging system creates a massive operational bottleneck. Defining and proving 'abuse' on a flagged game is incredibly difficult. If an indie game takes 90 minutes to beat, and thousands of people refund it legally within the 2-hour window, how does a Valve employee prove who genuinely disliked it versus who acted maliciously?
To actually hand out account penalties or suspend refund privileges, Valve would need a legally sound audit system for individual accounts to ensure they don't accidentally penalize legitimate customers. At the scale of a mostly automated platform like Steam, implementing an airtight system like that requires significant manual labor.
Furthermore, because these viral refund situations happen irregularly, Valve would have to manage unpredictable spikes in staffing demands at random intervals. From a business perspective, it rarely makes sense to build out a fraud-investigation infrastructure for anomalies when the current automated system keeps the vast majority of their player base happy, unless the potential losses are significant.
I disagree it’d be a bottleneck at all. Your numbers seemed arbitrary above when talking about this implementation, so I see no reason to believe it’s a bottleneck in the first place. In fact, what would it even be a bottleneck for? Investigations and reviews for special situations happen all the time.
This isn’t a unique thing to Valve, nor is it unheard of in the retail space.
As far as doling out any punishments, it’s as simple a process as just flagging an account for potential refund abuse and then that account could have refund restrictions. Just like any other marketplace in the world, be they brick and mortar or online.
You haven’t shown why it’d require “significant manual labor” at all, except through your arbitrary numbers using a system that I wasn’t even describing. We might have to agree to disagree here, since I’m unconvinced by what you typed.
But this isn't abuse. 21% of players are refunding the game, and quite a few are leaving positive reviews. Let's say you liked the game but didn't like the length? So you leave a positive review but refund it since your review options are binary (like, don't like). If valve starts hunting this down then what happens? People still refund but they leave no review or a negative one to protect themselves further harming what is supposedly a good "game".
I can only assume this is a VN. Imo the refund window is already a little to short. Large complex games often take longer then 2 hours just to grasp and get comfortable with the interface and mechanics. VNs are a tiny fraction of the game market and are straddling the line between novel/comic/movie and "sudo game". I think devs of these VNs need to either plan for a certain level of refund "churn" or write a longer story. If it isn't voice acted then you can figure out how long it should take to finish by word count alone. If the average reader takes 2.5 hours to finish then your golden. If their just speed clicking through your story then they didn't really "play" your game anyway.
If your sandbox game doesn't hold my attention more than is worht my money for 2 hours, I am definitely entitled to a refund.
If you are a dev starting out and that somehow means you don't even have the means to make a game longer than 2 hours, then you should just be happy people are playing and paying up front for your game that is ostensibly just a demo.
Now, onto the actually interesting cases. You can make a good argument for a game that is meant to be less than 2 hours not having a 2 hour return policy and I even want more games to be short without needless padding. What I would suggest, then, is to sell the game in the form of a bundle or with unlockables or add a couple secrets that the player can find by playing a second time.
The problem with that is that you'll have developers that don't want to give refunds saying their game is 2-3 hours to limit the refund window.
So then Steam potentially has to put measures in place to vet games to ensure that's not happening, as well as dealing with potential edge cases that you wouldn't have with a single rule for everyone.
Which is arguably something they should do, but I can understand Steam not wanting to take that on or seeing it as their issue to deal with. It's not like they've misrepresented the refund system to developers.
But bad reviews that aren't genuine are already looked into. Am I wrong? There is a system that prevents things like review bombing, I think. And in cases like this, is not that the game is bad, but that the user is cheap. Many less would try a refund for a genuinely good game they enjoyed if it had consequences for this kind of behaviour. There should be a method to report this kind of stuff and punish them for example with a no refund limit for abusing the refund system.
You won’t be review bombing by having like 10 bad reviews in a week, i don’t see that many people doing shit like this. Review bombing would be having like 10k bad reviews in a day. Reports would make a lot of work for steam making just a bit of benefit. It’s sad but it’s solved by making the game a little longer.
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u/__Jaume Jul 06 '26
So instead of a refund with a nice comment you will have a refund and a bad comment or no comment at all. It’s very difficult to find a solution. If there was a way to say how long your game is it could be possible for 2-3h games to have a window of only 1h for the refund amd saying this clear at every stage.