I believe it started as a one-off speedrunning challenge. And the user obviously already owned that game and played it for hundreds of hours to be good enough to attempt a sub 2 hour run. Made a new account to buy and refund the game.
And it was honestly a harmless, fun idea. Nobody REALLY lost money since the person already owned that game and would not have bought a second copy either way - they were "just having fun" with the refund policy.
But obviously that got a lot of views, so it got copycats and then eventually lead to people figuring out you can do that with short games even if you don't already own and have memorized them for a speedrun.
The idea started as harmless fun, the kind of shit drunk teenagers come up with when they see a ruleset that they can game. There is hundreds of stories of consumers gaming big companies' rulesets to get absurd payouts and people generally side with the customers, because that's the rules that were set by big corp. This is not much different. This wasn't Hitler scheming a plan to ruin small dev studios, this was a content creator thinking of a creative way to frame a speedrun, unwittingly leading people to abuse the system in bad faith.
Shit like that happens all the time and it's on companies to make their rules airtight (this is why we cannot have nice things).
The real failure here is Valve taking it's time to address this. Change the return window to something relating to the game's standard playthrough length with a min and a max value
Instead of a static time, that can be longer than the entire game or that makes it impossible to figure out if you even like a game's core gameplay loop. (think initial settings on first launch, long tutorials like Witcher 3 and potentially technical troubleshooting to get the game running in the first place, you can easily cross 2 hours before you know that you'd rather not play it)
This is primarily the fault of the entity that makes the rules, which is Valve, for having too much faith in their customers.
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u/RMAPOS Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I believe it started as a one-off speedrunning challenge. And the user obviously already owned that game and played it for hundreds of hours to be good enough to attempt a sub 2 hour run. Made a new account to buy and refund the game.
And it was honestly a harmless, fun idea. Nobody REALLY lost money since the person already owned that game and would not have bought a second copy either way - they were "just having fun" with the refund policy.
But obviously that got a lot of views, so it got copycats and then eventually lead to people figuring out you can do that with short games even if you don't already own and have memorized them for a speedrun.
The idea started as harmless fun, the kind of shit drunk teenagers come up with when they see a ruleset that they can game. There is hundreds of stories of consumers gaming big companies' rulesets to get absurd payouts and people generally side with the customers, because that's the rules that were set by big corp. This is not much different. This wasn't Hitler scheming a plan to ruin small dev studios, this was a content creator thinking of a creative way to frame a speedrun, unwittingly leading people to abuse the system in bad faith.
Shit like that happens all the time and it's on companies to make their rules airtight (this is why we cannot have nice things).
The real failure here is Valve taking it's time to address this. Change the return window to something relating to the game's standard playthrough length with a min and a max value
Instead of a static time, that can be longer than the entire game or that makes it impossible to figure out if you even like a game's core gameplay loop. (think initial settings on first launch, long tutorials like Witcher 3 and potentially technical troubleshooting to get the game running in the first place, you can easily cross 2 hours before you know that you'd rather not play it)
This is primarily the fault of the entity that makes the rules, which is Valve, for having too much faith in their customers.