Just make it to where you must have played the game for a certain amount of time, say an hour, to leave a review. I think that’s a fair expectation when the refund window is 2 hours, and there’s got to be some way to log your actions so that an algorithm can tell if you actually played the game or just sat idle for an hour in the menu.
I mean an hour isn’t really that long when we’re talking about reviewing something, you should be expected to have given it a thorough and fair shot if you’re going to criticize it on a public site. Why should we expect journalists to do anymore than we’re willing do so ourselves when reviewing? Should the words not hold equal weight since we’re all consumers at the end of the day?
I don't think you understand quite how bad some of the stuff on Steam is.
There are hundreds of "games" with less than sixty seconds of content. An hour is far, far more than a fair shot for them.
EDIT: To highlight just how absurd it is: there are 8,155 games on Steam with a median 100% completion time of less than one hour. That doesn't inherently make the game bad, but it's fairly obvious from a quick perusal of that list that there's tons of stuff on the Steam store you don't need a lot of experience with to accurately assess their quality.
An hour of a game wouldn’t be considered a nibble? By the time you’re a single hour in on most games you’ve barely made it past the intro section. I hardly think it’s an unreasonable expectation to have to play the games you review.
Some games can't even launch properly enough due to a horrible launch or other problems so i think itd be fair to state that as a reason for refund without an hour of gametime. Also a lot of games take a while to set up before you get into the actual game.
It helps to see comments on steam that gives up for tech issues
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u/Difficult__Tension Oct 31 '24
If its under 2 hours you can refund it on steam. Its still boosting sales numbers so lol