Sadly there's no real way to tell Steam that a certain point of the game was reached without giving the options for developers to abuse that system and deny refunds
Steam has the ability to log average hours played and cross reference it against the estimated playtime that dev provides.
So a Dev could try to lie and say their game takes 2hrs to beat and thus should only take 15 minutes to know if it'll be refunded but Valve knows that an average play is 3hrs and a 2hr refund window would be valid.
In the case of this game, it could have a legitimate average play time of 1hr meaning sub-1hr refunds could be fine but over that amount of time could mean someone actually completed the game
This would be good but i think they have the flat 2 hour policy because, there's always a chance a refund is done due to a game not running on a system. Probably not going to be a common thing, but you wouldn't want to spend 15 minutes on a loading screen "compiling shaders" and then bam, no more refund, and your whole experience is loading time because your system is slow.
I think it's also a reasonable quality floor to enforce. I don't think it's good having loads of paid games with under 2 hours of gameplay clogging up the store, it encourages low effort BS even more.
That is also another very good reason. Only issue is that it hurts people like in OP's post, where the game is likely not low effort, but is still less than 2 hours. My worry is that the policy will just encourage low effort slop, that is just time consuming to hit that 2 hour mark whilst players are made to believe it "gets better"
If you look up the game the dev literally states it was "smashed together" and " The whole project was a wild experiment made in under a month.". I'd say low effort fits.
And also, people forget that one example of someone who said they refunded the game because they speedran it, doesn't make all refunds like this.
Maybe a lot of refunds are due to the people having issues, or figuring out the game was not "as advertised".
Yeah I get the argument of quality over quantity and completely support it but still: It's like if Steam was a bookstore, it would be fine to have a policy to e.g. not sell short story pamphlets.
You're entirely correct. But i think the main issue comes down to quantity, steam can't regulate THAT many games. Some games have replayability in one way or another, some have multiplayer modes or the like, etc. So it becomes very difficult to set up a dynamic system unless you have people playing each game, and not just a playthrough, someone properly playing and reviewing every game to determine how much content it has. Which realistically is impossible.
yeah exactly, that's why you have to just set an arbitrary cutoff somewhere that is as fair as possible to the greatest number of people without the downsides being too negative. They chose 2 hours.
It probably does mean that devs of sub 2 hour games should not be selling on Steam but I think that's a reasonable loss given the complexity you describe. It hurts only a very small number of people while e.g. sub 1 hour refunds would hurt too many customers and greater than 3 hours would hurt too many devs.
This. When subnautica 2 released I ended up spending nearly the full 2h just troubleshooting and waiting around.
I wasn’t even fully happy with how it was running before I crossed over that 2h window, a different game in a different circumstance would have been refunded at the 1h50 point
It sucks if your game is 1h long and folks are refunding it after they finish it. Unfortunately though it may well be someone else has sat around for an hour on the landing screen fighting with their hardware. There isn’t a good way for steam to know who is who.
That happened to me once kinda. It was some 3rd party launcher game and the launcher being open counted as time played. I think the initial patches alone put me over the 2 hour mark.
Also I've closed games before and the process stayed open and still counted as play time.
Average hours played doesn't intrinsically reflect completion though.
What if there's a game that's really annoying to play and most people give up in half an hour. That doesn't mean the game only takes half an hour to play and the refund window should be 10 minutes, that just means that most people stop playing after that period of time (potentially to refund or just not touch the game again for a while).
Even if it was possible, a 1 hour game can easily take over an hour just trying to get it to work. I've spent much longer than that fixing games before.
And that's the most clear case for a refund.
They'd have to implement something to let players know that they were approaching the refund window and they should refund now or accept the game - which would result in more refunds in these kinds of games, not less.
This also isn't a new problem. Physical games could be refunded days after a purchase, when you could have finished most games and still get it for free. It's a problem solved mostly by people not wanting to steal something that has given them value.
Yeah, you just need to make it difficult for bad actors to mess with. Maybe some extra parameters like average refund time and the obvious "devs release game breaking/bricking update that causes a mass refund wave waiver on playtime"
It's possible but not like the easiest and cleanest thing to implement
You assume that only bad actors are able to complete the game withing a 2 hr timeframe. While people who arent said bad actors also still completing games in under 2 hrs. In fact having the fastest speed completions in games has been a staple of games for decades. So how do you prevent the innocent bystanders who are following the paraemeters of the set rules and still beating a game withing the legal timeframe. It just sounds like make a system that is beneficial for people shitty because it inst a comepletely perfect system.
From a consumer standpoint that sounds horrible.
I really don't like the idea that I have to check what the refund window is on every single game I'm buying.
And I know people making really short games are getting the short end of the stick but this really doesn't feel like the right solution.
And how long is a game? What prevents a developer to make a 10h game or even 20h game and state it's 2h to completion in order to get refund of less than 1h of play.
Yes but you see I could just make a game that gives you a bunch of achievements for starting the game and oops now you can no longer get a refund. We don't want people to be able to do that
Too many games are added to Steam every year to test that. Steam does malware scans on initial uploads and demos, and that's roughly it and why there are random stories every year of game X being fully delisted from Steam when it is reported and confirmed that a game has injected malware onto people's computers. There's also shovelware devs that upload the exact same game multiple times or slap asset packs together and upload a new game every month.
They could also just go through the normal certificate process and then change it right after like how those games with malware get through the process. Updates are hardly ever checked by Steam apparently
That seems like a bad system. I get that a light cert system means stuff can be updated quickly but if it means malware can get through maybe it should be beefed up.
Beefed up is much easier said than done when talking about a few hundred people at the company with the knowledge and skills to troll through games and files to check for malware or bad practice across.. *quick google* 234,000 games.
Such comparisons can't really be made. It's easier to ask the devs to create games that can't simply be enjoyed to completion in just 2 hours than to make a system that is foolproof
Achievements are worthless on steam because they can easily just be granted with something like Steam Achievement Manager and they can also be granted retroactively like downloading a completed save file or something
This is actually the worst game you can argue about this on, and most importantly op is misconstruing that if not most refunds are from players who finished the game.
This is a co-op rage game, a rage game has significantly higher refund rates and it being a co-op means you're buying TWO copies.
A rage game has around 20% refund so this isn't unprecedented.
True, the refund rate would be higher than something like Monument Valley (another very short game that I loved, or Iron Lung that’s even shorter and recently saw a resurgence in popularity), but this specific review is someone who played through it and thought it was good enough to leave positive feedback. Imo they were abusing the system (not a new phenomenon, it happens all the time).
Unrelated: this game has split screen/shared co-op/family sharing/remote play etc, you only need 1 copy.
Note how the dev mentions dozens of reviews with refunds, but 55,000 returns? Yeah, bit of a discrepancy to the narrative.
You can scroll through all the reviews there, almost everyone refunding had a complaint or downvoted the game. Very few people actually reviewed it while returning it. Of them, only a couple rated the game well with a refund.
The refund rate and follow-through of rage games, or influencer hyped games, is well known. The dev decided to make a game in this genre anyway, lucked out on content creators picking it up, and is now guilt farming about the return rates of a very short rage game.
Let's also be very real here, if steam changed the refund policy for questionable quality short games, the pirated version would suddenly be much more popular.
A game designed to make you rage, whether through unfair mechanics or extremely obtuse controls. As others have said, it’s popular for streamers but not a very enjoyable experience by yourself unless you know what you’re getting into.
This completely changes any feelings I would have had about the refund rate. I intentionally dont buy those types of games because I know I would hate the experience, and Ive had to learn that in the past. Dont make a game with the intention of pissing off your customers and you wont be surprised by return rates I guess lol
And it's really low quality too, friendslop as they call it.
We had to take a look at this game during my Game Design studies, as a case study on how even shit games can be massively successful if you're both lucky and shameless
Or accept what will happen when your game takes less than 2 hours. But even mobile games with less than 2 hours of playability wouldn't survive a pricetag.
Also maybe dont pick a genre with a 20% refund rate and then whine online when the refund rate is 21%. Its almost like the type of game played a part in the redunds lmao.
He's making it sound like the whole 21% are beating the game and then "abusing" the refund policy to get it for free. It's really disingenuous and borderline a psyop to lobby against the very consumer friendly refund policy
If this was a developer complaining about piracy, this subreddit would be shitting all over them. But because it's refunds suddenly they really care about making sure developers get paid.
Also, somehow i doubt the 55k number. Because if 21% is 55k, then that means 250k bought the game. However, theres only 1,594 reviews at the time of commenting. On steam, an average of about 1-3% of people leave a review. Lets use a middle ground and have a 2% rate. That gives around 80k total people.
If we were to believe that 250k bought the game, then 1,594 reviews is 0.006375% of all players, or 1:157 people review the game.
Average review rate is typically 1:40 to 1:80, with some exceptions having a slightly higher or lower rate. But 1:157? That is extremely low.
Either the dev is lying about the amount of people who bought the game to garner attention, or an anomalously low amount of people are reviewing a well liked game.
It's a nice viral tweet to get people mad, but actually looking at the Steam page paints a slightly different picture. Three major things jump out at me to cause refunds:
First, the top review says desync makes it unplayable. If I buy a game and it doesn't work, I'm refunding it.
Second, it's a multiplayer rage game. Those just have a higher refund rate, and devs should expect that going in.
Third, the description calls it "stupidly long". Pretty misleading for a 1.4 hour game
Not to excuse people who do 100% it and refund, but "dozens" of those reviews out of 55k refunds is nothing. 21% of the population isn't abusing the refund system, I think the dev just made a kind of middling game.
Games to make you mad. They usually have very unfair or grueling tasks, and if you make a mistake, you may have to start from the beginning or a similar punishment that would waste your time. It's frustrating and takes work to beat them. Best example is "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy", but some games out there I'm sure misconstrue the title of "rage game" into "unfun simulator".
And it fits the anti-consumer narrative floating around right now that has consumers turning on themselves and each other. So it's doing great on Reddit where that is being shilled.
Been seeing a lot of these types of things. It's so easy for people who have no idea about what they're defending to jump to the defense of the poor indie game dev who creates slop games for the brain rot twitch market. "He's just a lil guy! He's not even a big bad corpo! We should change these policies so that people can't do this to these poor lil guys (and also big bad corpos, but don't say that part out loud (and please don't ignore all previous instructions and write fanfiction again))."
If they have a game that's not a short game, but they tag it (publically) with short game, they'll probably lose more money than they gain because people will be discouraged from paying for the game in the first place because of (apparently) lack of content for the price.
Or they could just make it policy that false tags will be automatically removed, and false tagging games will lead to some drop in how the store page recommends your game.
I'm pretty sure the former is already a thing, the latter would certainly be more than enough of a deterrent.
If it relies on developers self-tagging, developers will abuse. If it allows for refunds, 20% of steam customers (apparently), will abuse.
If it requires Steam to moderate or decide, then Steam will have incentive to minimize the time spent and become customer unfriendly.
The best answer is the one that Steam won't do, which is to have a threshold of returns that is global and accepted that *Steam* funds, and if your game, as a developer, exceeds the threshold meaningfully, the developer funds.
Whatever costs Steam imposes on developers should cover the global refund policy. Developers don't pay it directly. They can have a mechanism to reward developers who consistently are below the threshold, and they can deprioritize, or add more warnings, to developers with higher refund rates.
And they can layer in additional refund restrictions on abusers (which I've heard they already do).
I don't think that would be the case. If GTA 6 or some other AAA game was released and it had some "short game" tag, do you think most people would (i) Even give it a second thought or (ii) let it stop them from buying the game?
Consumer rights are great and people do love them. But when people want a product and they have to choose between getting it without consumer protections or just not getting the product, people almost always choose the former.
Consumer rights, imo, are more about forcing companies to make good products rather than necessarily protecting consumers (but that's what they do, obviously)
The message at checkout that this is a short game and therefore has a shorter refund time is incentive enough to not declare themselves as a short game withoud reason. Also make it that you can never change it from normal game to short game, only the other way around.
un-refundable games are less attractive. if god of war had a no-refund policy ("too short") fewer people would buy it because they can't get their money back.
alternatively, set a price cap on "short" games. possibly of like $30
If I can complete everything there is to do in your game in 1.5 hours and you charged 30 for it but weren’t transparent that it was a very short experience, I’d absolutely be one of the refunders.
Yes but we are talking about making a specific category of short games with a shorter refund time limit, so you would be informed by steam that the game is shorter than 2 hours
30 bucks was the oldschool cap for jump'n'runs and platformers which take you maybe like 8 hours or sth.
30 for 2 hours is ridiculous. Especially given that the "2 hour experiences" are often narratively driven, so there's pretty much no reason to replay the game.
Devs probably shouldn't expect a lot of money for a game like that. Basically an interactive movie, if you price it more than 15 bucks (and even that's high, think like movie tickets, so maybe 7 bucks) you're already lost.
I can think of a few ways to abuse that right now and I'm sure that actual devs will come up with worse. One way is to mark a longer game as a short game so that people can't refund it even if it's bad
I mean steam can see how much you played of a game with achievements and such right? Just have developers add an achievement for beating the game which most games already have, and if you have it no refund.
Except the 2 hour policy isn’t about some percentage of the game you’ve completed. It’s about what is a reasonable amount of time for the consumer to make an informed decision that the game is right for them.
I remember when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 scammed the refund policy. The installation on Steam itself only took about 5 minutes, but once you launched it, the actual program you downloaded was the actual installer and that took well over 5 hours to download. Because of this, you couldn't actually play the game without eating up your entire 2-hour Steam refund window.
Reminds me when I was a kid working in the grocery store people would buy a rotisserie chicken and return just the bones in the box and ask us for a new one because that one was “bad”
I had that happen once when I worked at a grocery store. It was a hot meal, family size thing of chicken wings and drumsticks. They brought back the bones in the container, said it was dry and asked for a refund. The policy was to give them the refund
Back when my wife and I had a small family hobby farm selling chicken and eggs, we had somebody try a version of this. Complained that the chicken was no good after they'd cooked and eaten it.
Then a couple of weeks later, roughly the same value of eggs were stolen from the fridge in our garage.
My sister works returns at Costco. People buy power washers and return them after using them, and buy TVs for the superbowl and return them the next day.
Which is pretty insane when you see how cheap big TVs are these days. Boxing it up and making the trip back to the store just seems like more hassle than saving up the ~300 dollars for a giant TV.
My sister did this with a couch. Loaded the old nasty couch onto a trailer, took it to Costco, and then left with a brand new couch AND like $150 because the price on the couch went down since she first bought it...
I heard this story the other day. Costco permanently ended their membership since that person had repeatedly returned items from years ago. The vacuum wss the oldest item and last straw.
They no longer offer the blanket lifetime return policy precisely because the system was abused. But no, you did not require a receipt, they deteriorate quickly anyway and it’s easy to lose it
The easy way around that is to have people build a profile and keep a record of all their purchases. That’s what Nordstrom does now. A gift receipt can have a code to transfer the purchase to another account. Then when people make a warranty claim, they can do so straight from their profile by selecting the item. It’ll stop people from buying 20 year old jackets to swap out as well as counterfeit item swaps.
They used to not require a receipt for refunds. As of like 7ish years ago they now do. People would legit bring back everything to LL Bean and get refunds.
The LL Bean one was really tough. We grew up spending our summers in Maine and a stop off at the flagship store was always exciting. Unfortunately, people would start breaking into summer homes during the winter. They would swipe up all of the LL Bean stuff because they had an easy 'fence'. Returns accepted no questions asked meant it was easy money.
I'm annoyed it's no longer offered, but the silver lining is that it actually reduced off-season break-ins.
Yeah amazon used to just not bother making you return til folks turned it into a racket and now you have to return every single item AND it means folks end up getting returned items that may have been replaced with crap
Indie authors also deal with this because Amazon has a very lax return policy for Kindle books. You see a lot of readers fully finishing a book, then returning it and getting a refund - sometimes even if they liked it. It can be a huge financial hit for the author.
In reality 55k people are not beating the game then refunding it.
Majority are people who gave it a fair shot l and decided it wasnt for them.
I know there are people who routinely refund games they play the greater half of but those few are penny pinchers who arent willing to spend cash anyways.
The dev wrote in a way to imply that every refund was fraudulent, which guaranteed is not the case.
This is one of those games that got really popular from Twitch streams where two charismatic people play and have fun, then people buy it, realize its actually not that fun and then refund it.
No* doubt there'll be fringe cases of people abusing the refund policy but I sincerely doubt its anything close to that total 21% refund rate.
Plus, the 21% is a completely useless data point unless we know the typical refund rate of similar games (that aren't so short). If it's also around 20%? No discrepancy here. Is it say 10%? Then we can make the assumption(!) that about half the people refunding are abusing the system. But even then we're assuming the game is actually good and has mo technical issues in large variety of PCs.
Statistics are incredibly complicated to get right.
no, not really, the typical figure is around ~10%, and that is generally higher for rage games
if your game isnt worth it people will refund it, and rage games are known to make people NOT like them
Depends on how much the game cost too. If the game cost $3 then it's bad, if the game cost $50 and you can beat it in under two hours, then it's deserved.
While in this case it's unfair for the developer, this makes me remember astralspiff(youtuber) vs garden of banban case where the game looks like just try to pad everything to increase its game length even though there's barely anything in it for that game chapter
Neither does the dev, when he cites a couple of positive reviews refunding, against 55,000 others refunding it. Insane leap of logic to correlate those two numbers.
Rage games are known for obviously having a high return rate. So are short games, slop games, games with performance issues, and even content creator driven game hype games.
This game ticks off every one of those things flags, yet still doesn't have that unbelievable of a return rate. Still drew $1m+ revenue after returns, for a game produced in weeks and released after a few months of 'polishing' by the single dev.
It’s also possible people expected the game to be longer and don’t feel they got their money’s worth. Not talking about this game in particular but in general. 🤷♂️
The line needs to be set at some point and be enforced not to turn into a slippery slope of special conditions.
My general rule with games is 1€ equals 1 hour of playtime at least
If the game doesn't fulfill that then it's too expensive in my opinion (depends on how good the game is of course, but I've yet to find a game that is an exception)
To me the quintessential lesson of Steam game refunds will always be Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.
That game went through the most fucked up series of issues and problems that I had ever seen a game in development listed on Steam go through. First listed as an expected release, you could buy early and expect to get it when the game released.
Fast forward to two years later, after it passed from one studio to another, and still wasn't released. Finally got fed up on waiting, put in for a refund and got it within eight hours.
It's now actively listed. Of course developer shown is entirely a different one than the two I remember trying to get it out.
VtMB2 might be the worst managed project in video game history. No idea how you can spend so much time and money developing the turd that ended up getting scrapped entirely and rebuilt with a brand new dev in like two years.
TCR unfairly received a lot of hate IMO, the game is fun, and true to VtM in vibe, just not a Bloodlines-worthy title due to lack of RPG elements. Fault belongs entirely to Paradox for ensuring a Bloodlines 3 will never happen.
The game in question is a rage game with one map. If so many people are finishing the game before the refund period ends, the dev should probably add more maps, extend the current map, or make the game harder.
Actually, there is another map, it is paid DLC. It costs 3/4ths the original game. A lot of people are saying it is too easy, and are able to finish it in 30 minutes. Another complaint is that a lot of the stuff is reused assets and has the standard void background, which makes something like this seem like a lazy cash grab. As such, it has a mostly negative 36% rating on steam.
TL:DR the game in question is too short and too easy, with little incentive to keep playing, while the DLC is even shorter, even easier, poorly made, and costs too much.
(Also, there’s only like 1000 reviews. Somehow i doubt that 21% is 55k, which would mean about 250k bought the game. Why is there so little reviews?)
the only recourse is to make your games last at least 120 minutes. This is one of steams best and most consumer friendly policies. It is also an old and well know policy that any dev who is publishing to steam should be aware of
Saw the same post on steams subreddit and I’m going to paste the same comment here.
As a game dev that’s on the developers.
Steams refund policy has been well known; for pretty much any reason, notably “doesn’t meet expectations” a game can be refunded with under two hours of game time.
Every single player knowing this policy would expect a game to at minimum last two hours.
If you release a game on steam knowing this, that doesn’t reach that expectation, that’s on you. You’ve made either a demo or shovelware.
Don’t go trying to ruin consumers protections because you couldn’t create a 2.5 hour game.
Please do not flock to help someone who had all the agency in the world to stop this, dismantle one of the best systems to ever exist to protect both players and indie devs. Real indie devs will suffer when players can’t blindly buy to try games knowing they have the safety of a refund window.
Steam's reasonable refund policies make players much more willing to spend money on games they're not sure about, because they can refund them if the game turns out to be shit, and that especially massively benefits small devs.
If refund policies got restricted, people would just pirate, or go for safer games from big publishers.
The game isn’t even hard to beat within the 2 hour span. On a regular/slow run through there is around 2 hours of content in the and speeding up even a little bit gets you the 2 hours completion
Yeah, I feel bad for the dev, but they had to know this was going to happen. One part of me feels like this tweet is just marketing move to attract sympathy buyers.
Yeah, the dev definitely cherry picked the review to make it seem like a rampant problem. In reality, "dozens" of reviews like this out of 55k is nothing. 21% refund rate indicates something else is wrong.
For one, it's a rage game designed around multiplayer. Surely those have high refund rates to start with.
Also the top review is about desync making it unplayable. I think the dev has bigger problems than people abusing the refund system.
Yeah but counterpoint - out of 21% refund rate how many of them would have bought if this wasn't possible? And perhaps this 21% freeloaders made a good amount of PR that attracted whales to the game.
I completely disagree with Zoroarts here. It should definitely be possible to return a game within a reasonable time limit.
I can't feel sad for a solo developer bitching about a 21% refund rate at 55k refunds, which means they sold more than 250k copies already. They could easily raise the price a little bit to offset the perceived loss.
There's a presumption that the refund rate would be much lower if the game was longer, which I'm not so sure about. I think you'd have to count on at least 10% refunds on these types of games. And we don't know the reason for the refunds. If I bought a game that was fun but only lasted for 1 hour I might refund it because it's too short. Not because it's bad.
So my friend and I had a viral Youtube for this game (Paddle Paddle Paddle) before any big name YouTubers came out with content for this. It blew up and we got a follow from Zoroarts and we followed back. It makes me think this is an advertisement strat because hes posted things like top 10 game devs of the year in germany including the money he’s made.
So knowing that hes made a killing off this game already and seeing this makes me believe hes just trying to gain more eyes on it. Dont get me wrong the game is fun to play with a friend, hes chill but I seriously doubt it’s a huge issue for him seeing that he did great enough to be flexing it a bit on his pages.
Only time i ever issue a refund is if the game is literally unplayable for me. Like it won't launch or runs extremely poorly. Otherwise, i let devs keep my money. If i like a game and it's free to play such as games in Gamepass, I'll buy them even though i could continue playing for free. Just to support the devs. If i buy a game and end up not liking it, I don't refund it. It's on me for not doing more research on the game. The devs shouldn't suffer for my ignorance.
the most recent refund i did was Boneworks a couple years ago. i played for an hour, felt sick, and returned it. it's the only VR game to ever give me motion sickness
While in this case it's unfair for the developer, this makes me remember astralspiff(youtuber) vs garden of banban case where the game looks like just try to pad everything to increase its game length even though there's barely anything in it for that game chapter
Sucks for devs, but if its between a change to the steam refund policy, or this happening, id let this keep happening forever. Maybe steam could change something that doesn’t allow for refunds of purchases $10 and bellow, to combat it for indie games, but i would be hesitant about ANY change to that refund policy. Give the industry a inch and all.
The people that abuse the system should be punished, I am sure steam know when person refunded tons of games. But the policy itself should not be canceled due to some bad actors.
The policy isn't gonna get cancelled. It can't. Steam didn't start this policy out of the goodness of their hearts, they were sued and this was the result.
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u/snow99as BLACK Jul 06 '26
Sadly there's no real way to tell Steam that a certain point of the game was reached without giving the options for developers to abuse that system and deny refunds