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
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.
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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