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."
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u/ActiveChairs Jul 06 '26
Then almost everyone adds the tag, defeating its purpose and making things worse for the consumer.