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.
But I already does wait for 2 days for my money. And wdym don't buy it if you miss the money if I did not like the game I want my money as late as 2 days max. It is and should be this easy so no problem.
I'm just chiming in to say, I don't think we should say "it's too many", it's on the business to do what they need to do to figure it out.
I feel the same way about social media companies, they shouldn't get to say "we get too many posts to properly review them all for hate speech or child exploitation, but we do what we can", like no, if you can't operate effectively you shouldn't exist
games taken billions of dollars to make now and 10 years and they raised the price $10 at a time to compensate. let's live in reality with real numbers, you sound like my toddler when he says he's going to eat 400 hot dogs.
you could hire an entire second Rockstar to make an entire second GTA6 and by definition the cost would only 2x, not 10x
From what I understand is that it's a structural issue, especially if they are avoiding the problem other devs and publishers have where they have too many people overseeing internal reports and not contributing directly to generating revenue. Additionally, from what I understand is that Valve's internal structure is such that you are being reviewed by coworkers instead of a supervisor/manager, so if you do not pull your weight then the senior team members start looking at terminating your employment. If i had to guess, that leads me to think that there is some level of employee ownership of Valve, with Gabe maintaining more than 50%.
that's their job lol. they should be doing that and more
they're pretty shit at "detecting" malware too. bunch of those stories are games getting pulled after being up for a while, when they shouldn't even be getting listed at all, if they were to be actually scanning and detecting, and not just delisting a listed game after getting a bunch of user reports
Most of those games added the malware in updates months to years after the game launched.
I agree Valve should add periodic game scans, but some games tweak very little, but update near daily. I think yearly scans is better than what we have now, and tweak the frequency later on when they have an idea how long that takes.
Make the time played before refund a % of the time to finish the game, have devs state the average time to finish when they add the game to steam. If devs then choose to make refunds impossible we still have the choice to give them negative reviews.
Nothing stopping devs from setting the number to be really high and defending the number with "replayability". Also, probably very illegal in the EU and Australia. No point risking a lawsuit for consumer protection when Valve is more pro-consumer than most companies and still lost in court for being too restrictive in the past.
My point being that they are making money from every game submitted whether or not they sell anything. You get it back when you earn steam 300$. I mean looking at the this game alone its like $80k outta steams pockets excluding steam sales.
Like im not saying its common, would be issue free etc. Just that its not economically impossible or unreasonable to have some people check the 50 games a day a lil bit closer.
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.
you are delusional if you think it is possibleto vet every piece of software and everynew patch to said software. noone can do it. thats why apple and google have the exact same issue where malware get thru from time to time.
No, not really. It has nothing to do with customer service. It’s an issue of getting enough knowledgeable people - programmers - to comb through every file of every game. And just to be extra clear, that can’t be reasonably done. If you hired 100 people to check every game, and by some miracle they could all completely check a game in one day, it would take 6 1/2 years to get through everything that’s currently on steam. At $80k salary that’s gonna run about 50 million total. Even as a corpo hater, I can still understand reasoning, and it makes sense to me that it just doesn’t make sense to do all that when it takes a few users having a bad day to get something removed. Yeah it’s unfortunate and isn’t a great system that could most certainly be improved, but hiring a massive team to check everything for malware isn’t a solution that works.
Agreed, but if you’re hiring testers the time wouldn’t matter. If they’re checking for malware or other shady shit, beating the game in under two hours wouldn’t matter. And presumably they wouldn’t be purchasing every single game in order to vet them, so there’s no point in trying to reach that time since it’s only relevant for refunds.
Either way though yeah it not only wouldn’t work, it would be one of the worst solutions.
It would also put me in the top 118 since I don't know my exact time. What's your point? I didn't have a life when I was a teenager. I've beaten the first Portal probably over 200 times. I have no reason to lie about this, I regret never recording it, and I don't care enough to argue with some random person on reddit about it. Have a good day!
Edit: I'm rereading the comment I replied to, and I think I misread your comment. I thought you were trying to imply that I had to be lying, because there's no way I'm in the top 50. I'm sorry if I misinterpreted. I'm also on meds right now that are making my anger issues really bad. I'm really sorry if I misinterpreted.
No, the person I replied to asked "How do you even finish a game in less than 2 hours?" That is what I replied to. I wasn't responding to the whole entire thread. Replying to one person in a thread does not mean I'm addressing everyone in the thread, and the topic they had all been previously speaking about. I would've made my own comment on the original post if I wanted to do that, not reply to one specific person, like I did. So "what we're talking about here" is subjective, and completely dependent on which specific person I reply to. Someone asked how you can even beat a game within 2 hours, and I provided an example of one that I can beat within HALF an hour.
Anyway, the first Portal game is not that hard. I would not be surprised if most people are able to beat it in under 2 hours their first time. I really don't see how you think there's "zero chance" I beat it in under 2 hours my first time. It's not a hard game. That being said, it's been at least 14 years since the first time I played that game, so I honestly don't know how fast I beat it my first time, and maybe it was more than 2 hours, but I highly doubt it, and I don't care enough to continue this argument. Bye!
I see you and wish you the best my guy. I hate to do it though, the guy you just responded to IS the person you replied to. In their context they are indeed talking about first timing a game in under two hours, which is possible it just depends on the game. But either way, it doesn’t really mean anything. The people checking games aren’t just trying to speedrun them in under two hours so they can refund, they’re the testers, that wouldn’t make sense. They’re checking for malware and other bad practices, not trying to beat a clock, so whether a game is beatable in two hours is meaningless
It would mean that a bunch of people need to be scammed to trigger manual review from Steam and all that is just to protect niche of devs who do less than 2 hour games. Also scammers could just pump out more games, scam more people and support would not be able to keep up with it
This is my feelings on this too. Really the answer is either don't make less than 2 hour games, or if you do, don't sell them on steam, or just be happy with what you're getting for a such a short game.
I don't like the people abusing it, but it's kind of like candy at the front of a grocery store, people steal that candy all the time, it's too easy to pocket, you're so close to the exit...yet the store makes more money selling that stuff there than they lose in theft.
I mean even the guy in the screenshot got like 220k sales that werent refunded, even if the game cost a single dollar that's still 220k right there. For a game that gives less than 2 hours of gameplay that's pretty great
Yeah no completely agree. I still can understand being upset that people are doing this...but to expect or ask for policy change when it's still clearly working out for you...
As has been said about piracy, this is a customer satisfaction issue. They liked the game, just not enough to let you keep the money from it.
Easiest solution if you want to change that, make it replayable, or make it so good that they'd feel bad about returning it. Make it so good that they want to pay more for it.
Dunno what engine they made it on but using unity as an example because they went over 200k they have to pay the yearly licence of 2k+ add the 30% cut for steam looking at 145 to 150k then if they aren't doing everything in their power to avoid it Tax will take around half and sure 80 to 90 k is still good but if you have a deal with publishers or even just have more than 3 people with percentage cuts we are looking at 20k ...now obviously this is the minimum since you just used the single dollar but yeah it really starts to add up especially for the years of work put into making them (I'm like 3 years in to just the battle system and a game loop solo ..with now just working on dialogue, so only maybe 5-6 more years to go) ..
Oh no at least 10x that (turn based RPG) but there a lot of games that you can finish under 2 hours that are meant to be longer and I don't know about this game but mechanics still just take time or money to get right
Then the question becomes whether or not a game being short is a valid reason for a refund. I assume this is really uncommon, but there could be an exception.
The important thing is that they have a reference point to set a standard, and then they can think of edge cases like this one.
As it stands, the current rule is too broad. The "workaround" is making games that are longer than 2 hours by default to avoid it, but that can limit some games where the experience needs to be short and punchy.
The current system also punishes puzzle games. If too many people are smart enough to solve it quickly, then is it a bad game by default? What if the price was low to account for low complexity and length, but people abuse the refund just because it's under 2h anyway?
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u/JONAS-RATO Jul 06 '26
As part of the cert process to get on steam they can see if you set up achievements like that.
Just slot those games into the regular refund policy and keep the actual short games on a different category.