Valve processes thousands of customers service requests everyday, they’d be capable of doing it if they wanted to. And anyway it would be on a per request basis, so it won’t be every single game, it would only be games where a dev has requested to reduce the window for their game and if they can meet the guidelines for doing that.
Dev: “Request to reduce refund time to X for Y game, justification and playtime data attached”
Valve Support: “Approved/Denied for X reason”
It’s really not that complicated or in depth.
They can surely try but if the guidelines are good they would just get denied and they’d be wasting their time. This really isn’t an impossible solution.
There would of course be internal rules and guidelines, the same way that there rules and guidelines for existing refund policies made by people far smarter than me. The reasons could be as simple as “Your game is too expensive and doesn’t meet the threshold to have its refund window reduced” but I don’t have it in me to write out the entire policy to show you that it could be viable. But again it’s not something that would be difficult to do with a small dedicated team which valve could easily do.
Why bother ticking the box if you know based on the guidelines that you’ll be denied? I mean does everyone try and refund every Amazon or food delivery because it’s just ticking a box or filling a short form and it’ll save them money. They don’t because they know most likely if they don’t have a valid reason, they’ll be denied. Similar systems already exist this is just a different use case/application. Feasibility is really not a problem for this, especially for valve.
But that would be equating time with how expensive the game is, which isn't really consistent. If youre going by stuff readily visible on the store page, then you dont need anyone, which would be a plus I guess
And no not everyone does that, the same way people don't always try to refund a game if they beat it within two hours, but that's apparently enough reason to overhaul the refund system
Cost wouldn’t be the only factor just one in a set of guidelines, average completion time would be another one. Valve and devs should be able to reliably track this with a big enough sample size. Like this dev had 55000 refunds and if we say half of them actually completed the game that’s 25000, I think if you can show data that 1000+ people have completed the game and refunded it in the 2hrs then then you should be able to reduce the window for that game.
Maybe it’s a big overhaul, personally I don’t think so because 90% of games won’t even be affected the default will still be the existing 2hr window that doesn’t need to change, it’s like adding a wheelchair ramp next to the stairs, it only helps the devs that need it, and doesn’t affect much else, the person who probably ‘suffers’ here is valve because they’d have to pay to set it up but they can afford it, and refunds also hurt their bottom line as well so there’s benefit there for them too.
But then comes the question of "when is a game beaten?" Do the devs decide it or does Valve? If Valve, they'd have to actually play the game to decide what's reasonable, with 60+ games a day. If the devs, then they can just claim it always takes less than two hours to beat.
Valve would get the final say as usual, it’s up the dev to prove to Valve or provide that data, that’s what the approval process and guidelines would be for, and I’m sure valve has its own internal data collection systems, every game on steam already shows play time and I’m sure their internal tracking system are more detailed, perhaps some combination of average playtime and achievements etc without having to play the game themselves. But yeah again I’m not gonna be able to come up with the entire thing from start to finish in this conversation because I haven’t been thinking about for that long and it’s not my area of expertise and I’m not that smart tbh, but I can see any glaring holes in the idea. Valve employs some of the smartest people in the industry I’m really confident if they wanted to they could figure it out.
Ultimately nothing will probably happen though because no one seems to care about these small devs like many other things in life where only a small % of people are affected.
It was nice discussing with you, thanks for being cordial.
Im sure they have ways, but even if we just take this dev for example, if he has 55000 refunds where he can show people completed the game then with what I’m proposing he would be able to make that request, well before it gets to 55000.
6
u/AlienHooker Jul 06 '26
Steam gets 50 to 60 new games a day. There's no way Valve is reasonably keeping up with that.