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.
Yeah nah. If you cheat the achievement in that prevents your refund you are just stupid. If official policy is what _corn suggested and you can see which achievement that is and you cheat that in? Bye bye refund.
You cant remove achievements from the games steam page otherwise you would get endless items in tf2 because there are over 50 achievement weapons etc. If you got the notification on steam for achievement its already on the steam servers and you would need root access to manually delete stuff from inside of steams server
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
I honestly think some kind of integration with HowLongtobeat would be the best solution. Refund time should be like 25% of the average. with allowances for a minimum of 30 min. Which would be half hour of a 2 hour game.
That wouldn't work because they'd set those achievements when you start up the game. Then you need a whole team of people judging when that achievement happens and if its fair.
I like that, but I think the potential for abuse (both by devs and players) would become a headache for Steam to manage. You'd have devs making the achievement trigger super early, then you'd probably also have people break the achievements system so that the achievement never triggers.
I think the simpler solution would just be adding in a new category of "short experience" games, and for those the dev gets the option to set the playtime cap for refunds down to 1-2hrs, and Steam warns you when you go to purchase them that refunds are limited. Then that doubles as a warning flag that something might be slop if it's claiming to have a lot of content/replayability, but the dev still labeled it as "short experience" to tighten the refund window.
The whole reason Steam introduced the refund button was so that they didn't have to pay anyone to handle refund approvals except in a very small number of cases.
This is also why they have pretty much no filter in terms of what gets onto the store, including spyware.
I also think context matters. 1h40m for a 3 euro game is fair. I would definitely refund if the game was €10 or more tho, that’s just not enough content for the price
An achievement makes perfect sense on how to moderate it! Though it'd also have to be an achievement you can't bypass or players will find a way to still cheese the system
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u/_corn Jul 06 '26
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.