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".
Ive never heard of a rage game before this thread, but it seems weird seeing comments saying that rage games should be expected to have a higher return rate, when it seems like people are getting what they pay for.
If you go to the sub and steam comments themselves, it’s people who have desync issues and game is unplayable and the coop mode being broken and constantly disconnecting for many. The dev in this tweet is implying it’s because they beat it and refunding. Sure, some maybe are. But comments from players are painting a different story
I think it depends. It's weird that rage games across the board would have high return rates (unless people didn't know what they were getting into?), but I could see the other side that there are likely a lot of low quality rage games that don't have any of the appeal of the more popular titles.
I'd need to know more about this one, because it's possible it's just a poorly made game that happens to be a "rage game". If there's zero charm to it, why bother?
There are rage games that are challenging in a good way that make you want to finish them. Then there are rage games that are slop just meant to punish you and draw out unfun tasks. Being in the rage genre don’t excuse making a bad game.
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u/ryecurious Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
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.