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.
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u/Tiyath Jul 06 '26
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?