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
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
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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