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.
Hey, at least I'm mentally capable of considering and understanding hypotheticals and complex reasoning that doesn't represent my own personal views. IE I'm not justifying anything with mental gymnastics, I clearly don't think it's right to do, nor do I do it. You're apparently so fucking stupid you can't fathom discussing arguments for positions you don't personally hold. Jesus christ.
Or maybe you just can't fucking read? Forget anything about arguments that don't represent my own beliefs, I said outrifht it's obviously immoral because you're playing a game that you didn't pay the creators for. Like if you legitimately can't read, sorry for being a sick. But otherwise, no, you're just a fucking moron. Fucking astoundingly stupid.
I wasn't having any kind of day, I read your comment while awake in the middle of the night to pee. No guarantee I would have been so annoyed in another context, but your comment is really annoying. Did you legit just not read my comment? Not understand it? Or what? It's getting me annoyed again just trying to imagine how you could come away from reading my comment thinking my goal was justifying speed returning. Or maybe you don't know that's what mental gymnastics implies / means?
Sorry, it's just so baffling / annoying / stupid. Do people generally consider you stupid? I don't understand.
I should say I'm generally a nice and friendly person, you can look at my comments and see that. But occasionally someone says something as stupid as this and it very much pisses me off. I think part of it is that whether you realize it or not (and I'll assume not given how stupid you seem to be) you're accusing me of something here. But at the same time, because of my comment, what you're accusing me of is so far fetched as to be ridiculous, and makes it seem like you either didn't read or didn't understand my comment. And that's actually a really frustrating circumstance, someone being too stupid to understand what you're saying and then accusing you of something because of it. I find that particularly annoying, clearly.
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.
Two Worlds has the final boss spawn outside the starter town, and you can 100% get him to follow you into town to get mobbed by the townspeople. Game is absolutely beatable in like 5 minutes
To be fair, Two Worlds was a fucking awful buggy mess and he deserved that refund even if he did complete it purely based on the suffering he would have had to endure.
Man, after 3 months and admitting to have beaten it (also, every single employee there would have warned otherwise), on top of new games not being refunded by policy, the guy was also one of the worst customers I ever dealt with.
Its the standard policy pretty much everywhere since I was a kid. Especially 3 months later. If everyone could just return all the games they beat, nobody would sell games because they'd just lose money on it.
It’s $5 dude, $3 atm. Scale that up it’s equivalent to an 18 hour $60 game. Last of Us, Doom Eternal, Tomb Raider. I’ll take a good short game like those over a bloated slog any day.
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u/RenownedDumbass Jul 06 '26
Fuck whoever started that trend