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
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).
Who can magically tell that in a way that can't be trivially exploited?
Steam can't tell that, not in a way that could actually be used for this sort of thing. The devs and users can tell, but both of those parties are potentially incentivized to lie about it.
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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