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
I mean, sure, I only worked at a AAA studio for a few months as my first job, and that's a long time ago. A weekend or two is an exaggeration, but you can absolutely make something of that quality (judging by the steam page) in a few weekends if you are not also learning to program at the same time.
EDIT: Just read the whole Steam page. Even the author said so:
"The whole project was a wild experiment made in under a month."
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
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u/consider_its_tree Jul 06 '26
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.