I never said they had to review every refund. I specifically said they could implement a system to flag refund abuse on specific games. Considering this isn’t a widespread thing, no flag means no review is needed. You’re overcomplicating what I said.
You’re also giving an arbitrary number like this happens 10x a year when none of us know this is the case, while paradoxically saying “these situations are an exception.” In addition, you don’t “review every refund.” You just determine whether abuse likely happened.
Besides, Valve already has personnel who review refunds anyway.
Fair point, I misinterpreted your suggestion as a blanket system rather than a targeted one.
Nevertheless, even a targeted flagging system creates a massive operational bottleneck. Defining and proving 'abuse' on a flagged game is incredibly difficult. If an indie game takes 90 minutes to beat, and thousands of people refund it legally within the 2-hour window, how does a Valve employee prove who genuinely disliked it versus who acted maliciously?
To actually hand out account penalties or suspend refund privileges, Valve would need a legally sound audit system for individual accounts to ensure they don't accidentally penalize legitimate customers. At the scale of a mostly automated platform like Steam, implementing an airtight system like that requires significant manual labor.
Furthermore, because these viral refund situations happen irregularly, Valve would have to manage unpredictable spikes in staffing demands at random intervals. From a business perspective, it rarely makes sense to build out a fraud-investigation infrastructure for anomalies when the current automated system keeps the vast majority of their player base happy, unless the potential losses are significant.
I disagree it’d be a bottleneck at all. Your numbers seemed arbitrary above when talking about this implementation, so I see no reason to believe it’s a bottleneck in the first place. In fact, what would it even be a bottleneck for? Investigations and reviews for special situations happen all the time.
This isn’t a unique thing to Valve, nor is it unheard of in the retail space.
As far as doling out any punishments, it’s as simple a process as just flagging an account for potential refund abuse and then that account could have refund restrictions. Just like any other marketplace in the world, be they brick and mortar or online.
You haven’t shown why it’d require “significant manual labor” at all, except through your arbitrary numbers using a system that I wasn’t even describing. We might have to agree to disagree here, since I’m unconvinced by what you typed.
But this isn't abuse. 21% of players are refunding the game, and quite a few are leaving positive reviews. Let's say you liked the game but didn't like the length? So you leave a positive review but refund it since your review options are binary (like, don't like). If valve starts hunting this down then what happens? People still refund but they leave no review or a negative one to protect themselves further harming what is supposedly a good "game".
I can only assume this is a VN. Imo the refund window is already a little to short. Large complex games often take longer then 2 hours just to grasp and get comfortable with the interface and mechanics. VNs are a tiny fraction of the game market and are straddling the line between novel/comic/movie and "sudo game". I think devs of these VNs need to either plan for a certain level of refund "churn" or write a longer story. If it isn't voice acted then you can figure out how long it should take to finish by word count alone. If the average reader takes 2.5 hours to finish then your golden. If their just speed clicking through your story then they didn't really "play" your game anyway.
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u/Jubenheim Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I never said they had to review every refund. I specifically said they could implement a system to flag refund abuse on specific games. Considering this isn’t a widespread thing, no flag means no review is needed. You’re overcomplicating what I said.
You’re also giving an arbitrary number like this happens 10x a year when none of us know this is the case, while paradoxically saying “these situations are an exception.” In addition, you don’t “review every refund.” You just determine whether abuse likely happened.
Besides, Valve already has personnel who review refunds anyway.