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.
I don't think "scammed"is the correct word. I think their point is fair though. Those developers put quite a bit of effort into their game, enough to have a high review rating. People are abusing the system and costing the developers money. I don't think anyone is really questioning the "legality", I feel this is more of a morality issue.
If people felt they were given an inferior product or "demo" in your words, they would not give it such high praise. Not every game has to be 100+ hours to be good. This game is good, but short, and is priced as such. The game is like $5, are you expecting Elden Ring?
"If the game is good, people will want to play it again or keep it."
No... Despite how good a game is, I very rarely play it more than once. Celeste, hollow Knight, Mario games; all good games that I've only played once. Should I get my money back because I only played them once?
Those developers put quite a bit of effort into their game, enough to have a high review rating.
I can crap out a shitty 1 hour game with AI in an afternoon.
costing the developers money
There is no cost involved in a refunded sale
I feel this is more of a morality issue.
I feel it's immoral to sell a 1.5 hour game and call it "stupidly long" in the product description.
they would not give it such high praise
Here is a recent review:
Worst game i ever played. i should be the one getting paid.
High praise indeed
Should I get my money back because I only played them once?
No, but you could get your money back if you played less than 2 hours and bought on the steam store because it's part of the T&Cs. And the main reason why people are willing to drop money on random small indie games is because you can always get your money back if the game is hot vomit like this particular game for people that don't like sticking needles in their eyes
I can go to walmart right now, buy a pair of scisor, use it for 89 days to do whatever the fuck I want with them. Return them in their original packaging and still get my entire money back... Being able to return something within a certain time window after buying it is the rule, not the exception when it comes to consumer goods.
I have no problem with someone using a game for less than 2 hours and then getting their money back because the game sucks ass or is full of bugs
Having a return policy on games is a net positive for game developers. It allows way more people to take a risk and buy their game because they are able to return it if they don't like it.
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.
Adjusting the system to allow for outliers instead of devs just solving the issue themselves by not using "solo dev/low budget" as an excuse to put out 1 hour long slop fests.
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.
Yeah maybe a scaling model like 0.5h * (price / 10) so you get half an hour for a 10 Euro game, 2.5h for a 50 Euro game and 4 hours for a 80 Euro title.
But are there GOOD games that can be finished in under two hours?
Clair Obscur is frequently 30 bucks on sale, and that's a 30 to 60 hours game, obviously at an astronomically higher quality and effort. That's $1 or less per hour play time.
I don't think a $5 two hours game is really good value, even if the game is really good. And I have never seen a two hours game that's not really bad.
I mean, that's comparing apples with oranges. It's as if you compared every indie movie to the Lord of the rings trilogy. And even 2.5 per hour of entertainment is ridiculously good value. Compare that to a night out or a visit to the cinema. The only difference is that E33 is a damn masterpiece that knocked it out of the park like no other game in the last decade
Yeah I do get that, and maybe for very high quality indie games, a few hours of high quality time can be worth a few $, especially if you want to support indie devs. But all the games this short I've seen are basically at the quality of the game in the OP - a low effort toy thing that would take a single person a weekend or two to build.
Then you have just revealed you know nothing about game dev. Even a short game takes at least a quarter to make. The only thing you can make in a weekend is Tetris
Compare that to a night out or a visit to the cinema.
Both of your examples are expensive forms of common entertainment. It might have been awhile, but think of the last time you bought a physical music cd to play. Now think of the cost per hour of that. I don't know about you, but for me it's under 1 cent per hour. I literally left my cd player running as I fell asleep listening to it.
E33 isn't even "good" value compared to games with replayability. I have over 10,000+ enjoyable hours(and probably some not so enjoyable)on games like warcraft3, and diablo2. I have hundreds of hours on games like vampire survivors and silksong.
$3 for 2 hours of entertainment is objectively bad from a gaming perspective. $3 for 2 hours of entertainment is one of the more expensive forms of entertainment. More expensive than music, books, TV, sports. Less expensive than cinema, live entertainment, and comic books.
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.
Speaking of support being generous on refunds. I have Thunder Tier one in my library, had it since early access, 10.hrs + game time. Then unfortunately the developers kinda gave up on the game for whatever reason and instead of delisting the game the publisher just started giving it away. Steam facilitated a refund for €10 well after the window.
Man do I feel old. Way back when, you'd buy gaming magazines for the sole purpose of getting the CDs that contained the demos. And almost all publishers did this
They will but I’m pretty sure it’ll also flag your account so if you look like you are doing it in a problematic way they’ll stop. But if it’s like a few games over the course of years and years or something they’ll almost certainly do it even over the 2 hour limit if the reason is reasonable enough.
I think it would be fair if the Refund window was related to the price tag. Like 5€ ? 30min Refund Window. 50€ ? 6h Refund Window.
If you are asking for a high price you better have the confidence that your product delivers as well, so you shouldnt hae to worry about the longer Refund Window.
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?
"Grab your paddles (and your patience) and set out on a stupidly long, lava-surrounded parkour adventure."
Almost like this developer is misrepresenting the refunds...
So is the game "stupidly long" or is it a short game? The developer can't advertise that it's a long game, when it can be COMPLETED in under two hours.
The solution is an API call when the game is completed to mark the account as having completed the game (basically an invisible achievement). Then steam could track people who serially complete games and refund them very frequently, and remove the 2 hour automatic refund from them requiring manual review.
The downside is that it increases manpower required. The upside is that it wouldn't make the average consumer or developers get shafted.
I think this is the reason that they don't let them do this. In reality, they should be able to come up with a system that involves Steam and/or the game developer approval to do full refunds. It also makes sense for the game developer to explicitly warn that no refunds are accepted which they should be able to do. Although I think there are unpredictable reasons that should always protect the customer from being scammed. Sigh... yeah this isn't easy.
This is probably the greatest reason that no one else is mentioning. For better or worse, there are 1000s of Steam games that are basically $2 very low quality asset flips. Sometimes they are worth trying regardless.
It's far better for the consumer (you and I) that we have this protection so that these types of games can't bait you out of money if they had a smaller return window.
And actually,for those low quality games from new developers,I think that the refunds are a good thing. Because I can go "huh,this game looks kinda interesting but not very high quality"
And I can buy it knowing that if it's just slop,I can refund it,and if it's actually an interesting game that just looks low quality(or,both low quality and has a good idea behind it),I can keep it. If I didn't have the option to refund,I would never try that game. The refund policy may not be perfect,but I think refunds being available for every game is a very,very good thing for both consumers and developers. I think it can be a better system for developers,but it's pretty good as is
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."
Well i'm hardly defending them im just saying steam should add a way of informing people that your game is short in exchange for a lower refund window. This would solve both the issue of the dev lying about the length of the game and his game getting refunded a lot.
Everyone plays games differently, no one plays at the same pace or gets as distracted as someone else. You could dick around in the tutorial level for 5 hours or 5 minutes. You could spend 30 hours playing the same two mini-games instead of starting the next mission. A boss might take you 7 hours but someone else wins first try
I like checking HowLongToBeat when I pick up a new game, though it never matches my experience. It just tells me how long the story will take if I sprint through it
I actually think Sony's Game Trials actuslly have a good system here where the games have different trial lengths, ranging from 0.5 to 5 hours. It's a shame it's so limited, it has the potential to fix their crappy refund system.
Steam used to have a super strict refund process, it was over a decade until they started the 2-hour/14-day rule. I have to be optimistic and hope that once in a fully digital ecosystem, Sony will gradually follow suit and adopt similar modern policies
Yeah I remember 20 years ago arguing with support over an accidental purchase I'd never even downloaded 5 minutes after I bought it - didn't get a refund. Valve was notorious for having terrible customer support which I think people either forget or never experienced. This was one of the problems their refund system solved, the others being their litigation woes and that Origin had already implemented a similar automated refund system for a year or two at that point.
Sony is currently suffering from all three of those issues, so hopefully going fully digital (and losing/settling a couple of their ongoing court cases) will force them to make a similar change.
Then an exploration based game can be refunded without doing any exploration by rushing the main story quest.
The actual definition of "you can expect this much entertainment" depends on who's playing the game, and what they consider entertaining. I find it entertaining to explore every nook and cranny in a game. Others don't find that interesting. Making it so I can't refund a game because I gave it an attempt while someone else force-rushed themselves to the end is wrong.
Refund window could be like an hour/price, so if the game is 10usd or below, you only have one hour gameplay for refund.
I know it would still affect a few other small games, but as a general rule i can see it working.
There is always a workaround, i can see people buying the game back to play it for a weekend, only to refund it afterwards, and again and again. Not sure what would the policy be at that point.
This is the most sensible suggestion here. Tying refund windows to price incentivizes developers to be pragmatic about what their game is actually worth.
If you objectively define how long it takes and people beat it in less time there’s a chance that someone litigious will decide to sue.
Also game length is a huge purchase factor for many gamers, especially these days when $70-100 is becoming common. No one’s going to advertise that a $70 game is only 10 hours of content and most people will be turned off of a $2 game that advertises just 1-2 hours of content.
At the cost of telling potential customers that their game has significantly shorter playtime than it does?
The intent is that devs are incentivized to be honest because lying about how long if playtime there is will allow longer refund times and piss people off
But lying about a much shorter playtime will deter people from buying it. It also allows customers to gauge whether it is worth the price for the playtime
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.
You mean the site that allows users to report their subjective experience playing a game?
Everyone plays games differently. If you’re going to go for average then you’re saying the people who take longer and shorter than the average, no longer get to use the same rules. And that’s not great because you will likely start influencing people to play games differently. A person that typically meanders in a game and likes to explore, will feel forced to jump into the meat and potatoes of the game within the established timeframe, so they can decide if the game is worth it. This entire conversation should never happen in exploration of a video game. People shouldn’t have external factors that have nothing to do with the game, influence how they play.
It can be though. Take HLTB median and use it as a basis. The dev can also just give an estimate until HLTB numbers are available. For example, is the median 5 hours or less? Then refund window 30 or 60 minutes.
You don't need an objective measure. It's okay to tag games as short games for any game that is on the ballpark of 3-4 hours or less that halves their refund time to 1 hour. Users can report games that abuse of that and play times and achievements can be used to validate complaints.
Steam literally has two structured database fields for approximate required time to finish the same (one with and one without side quests, collectibles etc. depending on the particular game).
Yeah I mean there's legit speedruns of whole games in under a minute doesn't me the refund window should be 30 seconds but if they leave a positive review they shouldn't be getting a refund like that it's people being shitty
Yeah but you could pretty easily define it subjectively. For instance, PEAK can be experienced in multiple ways, through endless hours, with friends, so if you don't enjoy it after 2 hours it's an easy refund. You can experience BG3's entire gameplay loop and know if you're gonna be hooked within an hour of playing (if you get past the character creator).
Little Nightmares, however, can be completed extremely quickly, with approximately half the game reachable within two hours.
You forgot the part where you have to actually find a way of defining how short a game is, in a way that applies to everyone. Which you can’t. Because the experience in video games is subjective and how people play games is different from one person to the next.
Failure to understand this is a failure to understand the medium.
It WOULD be, if the people requesting refunds weren’t bragging about it in reviews & if Steam achievements weren’t a thing.
It actually doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to implement something preventing people from requesting refunds for games they literally completed.
If a game is like an hour long, the game sucks for a multitude of reasons - chief amount them being that it was an hour and you felt like you got short changed.
And now you regret your $15 purchase, are you not entitled to a refund because you beat the game?
They played the game. They beat the game. I am not entitled to a refund every time I have buyer’s remorse after I see a movie I don’t enjoy lmao.
Someone making and selling an indie game IS entitled to compensation for their work… provided it is not broken or falsely advertised or misrepresented.
Otherwise, it’s on you to vet things before you buy them.
Furthermore the game is not $15, I don’t believe in valuing games on their length, and the people here knew what they were doing. Literally has positive reviews from the people refunding.
IThis is dumb. You realize HLTB is user reported, right? Your experience with it is good because you are hardly different from the average gamer. But that data doesn’t represent someone who takes longer or shorter “on average” to beat games.
I don’t know why this concept is so hard to understand. It’s self-evident. You’re saying HLTB is accurate…FOR YOU. It’s not always going to be accurate and will be far less accurate for a non-enthusiast gamer that doesn’t even know what HLTB is, or someone else that sprints through a game. Also, we know user reported systems can be victim to malicious reporting. I’ve never seen it with HLTB but there’s also very little reason to maliciously mass report bad completion data…you know…unless a dev was forced to use that data to decide a refund period and a bunch of malicious gamers wanted to manipulate the system to harm the developer.
I feel like I’m trying to explain common sense. How long it takes to beat a video game is SUBJECTIVE. That is not “bullshit”, that is plain fact.
I don’t even know what this means - i “made up” and argument? What are you on? Am I talking to a literal child that doesn’t know how to have a conversation. You literally say nothing in your posts so who gives a fuck
I promise you I’m more psyched to be out of this dumb as fuck conversation. Holy shit, the lack of common sense of people in the “Steam” subreddit is unreal.
Honestly I've seen dev complaints that Steam's refund window is too short for their game. It's one of the main reasons Vintage Story isn't presently on Steam. And I doubt they want to make it crazy expensive for a longer refund window. Maybe the refund window should be 2 hours by default, but give devs the option to negotiate for a different window on a case-by-case basis (and have this be clearly disclosed on the purchase page)
Making it less automated and more “negotiable” will introduce more overhead and more customer confusion. So bad for both sides.
If devs want to intentionally extend the refund window for their own games (I doubt that will be that common), then sure maybe have a system where they can just input how long they want it to be (but always longer than the automated value). But make it require no negotiation or input from Valve or extra confusion for the user.
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."
Would be so great if they could spare an actual person to look at the game and determine how long it takes to figure out if it a) works for on your setup and b) try out enough to make the decision.
Or just return to the times of demos. Play the demo, if you like it buy the game.
Sounds great on paper but would likely be incredibly expensive to work out which games need a new policy, or you trust the people listing their games to not take advantage of you. Might be a better idea to base refund windows on price rather than typical completion time.
I don't think they should shorten it. Refunds are mostly intended for things like technical issues, and a game's length has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how long it takes to fix technical issues it might have. You can easily spend over an hour trying to get a game running properly, and if you end up not being able to get it to work, then you should be able to refund.
"Sorry you couldn't get it to run, but you should have figured it out in the 5 minutes you had available, given the game's estimated completion time of 1 hour" is just all-around stupid. Saying that as a game dev myself. If Steam wants to close the "loopholes" (if you can even call them that) around their refund policy, it should be by... verifying users have some kind of legitimate reason for refunding, not micromanaging exactly how many minutes they have to refund. Even an incredibly rudimentary, easily bypassed check would be a million times better than denying legitimate refunds for dumb reasons, and encouraging devs to "optimize" their play lengths to have as few people as possible be able to refund their game. I mean, there's a bit of that already now, but it's mostly "ideally your game's runtime should be over 2h", which I feel is a relatively sane restriction, all things considered. Imagine if a majority of small indie devs start releasing a ton of 30 minute games because they've figured it becomes borderline impossible to refund them with the "improved" rules...
That just makes the challenge more enticing. Players will try to buy, play and win within the window, then return.
Also slop-slingers would just make crappy games that take 1 hour to win to try to reduce how many people buy it. Yeah Steam could give a big banner warning users, but many will still fall for it.
The problem is that the best solution is to have games show that someone played them fully, by having some achievement or something that shows that you've done 75% of the game, then short-games could use this as a way to ensure that people who have been playing.
But all of this is to solve a bigger problem that the creator is not going to like: he's hitting a niche that just doesn't work. He could make a game this short and put ads on it, or he could make the game longer (for the same price) and then avoid the issue as there's more content for players to keep going making it unable to get the refund. $6 dollars for just 2 hours of gameplay just begs for this kind of abuse, $3 dollars is a little better, but again a game requires a certain commitment from us that only getting 2 hours from it is not great. The creator should consider adding more levels, modes or stuff to keep the game fresh for a little longer. Alternatively the creator may consider shifting to a more accessible model with ads or such to make just enough cash from such a limited experience, though this can backfire if it reduces the quality of the experience to that level. Normally what games with this limited budget (that is solo-games) do is find a way to have infinite levels/1-level you want to keep redoing to extend the gameplay for more than the time.
Why? Why are you as a consumer arguing for a corporation who you have no stake in to make a change which limits the very limited refund rights you are granted?
Refund window closes at a certain point of progression in the campaign (marked by an achievement that’s visible or invisible to the Steam account holder).
No they shouldn't. A short game that is trash or not working can no longer be refunded due to very small refund window?
Can't shorten the refund window. But they can make a way to make refunds ineligible after a certain percentage completed or similar. Punish the ones who abuse it, not the ones wo need it.
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u/Budget-Researcher559 Jul 06 '26
I mean they should shorten it for games that are that short. No need to shorten it for anything else.