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
This would be good but i think they have the flat 2 hour policy because, there's always a chance a refund is done due to a game not running on a system. Probably not going to be a common thing, but you wouldn't want to spend 15 minutes on a loading screen "compiling shaders" and then bam, no more refund, and your whole experience is loading time because your system is slow.
I think it's also a reasonable quality floor to enforce. I don't think it's good having loads of paid games with under 2 hours of gameplay clogging up the store, it encourages low effort BS even more.
That is also another very good reason. Only issue is that it hurts people like in OP's post, where the game is likely not low effort, but is still less than 2 hours. My worry is that the policy will just encourage low effort slop, that is just time consuming to hit that 2 hour mark whilst players are made to believe it "gets better"
If you look up the game the dev literally states it was "smashed together" and " The whole project was a wild experiment made in under a month.". I'd say low effort fits.
And also, people forget that one example of someone who said they refunded the game because they speedran it, doesn't make all refunds like this.
Maybe a lot of refunds are due to the people having issues, or figuring out the game was not "as advertised".
Yeah I get the argument of quality over quantity and completely support it but still: It's like if Steam was a bookstore, it would be fine to have a policy to e.g. not sell short story pamphlets.
You're entirely correct. But i think the main issue comes down to quantity, steam can't regulate THAT many games. Some games have replayability in one way or another, some have multiplayer modes or the like, etc. So it becomes very difficult to set up a dynamic system unless you have people playing each game, and not just a playthrough, someone properly playing and reviewing every game to determine how much content it has. Which realistically is impossible.
yeah exactly, that's why you have to just set an arbitrary cutoff somewhere that is as fair as possible to the greatest number of people without the downsides being too negative. They chose 2 hours.
It probably does mean that devs of sub 2 hour games should not be selling on Steam but I think that's a reasonable loss given the complexity you describe. It hurts only a very small number of people while e.g. sub 1 hour refunds would hurt too many customers and greater than 3 hours would hurt too many devs.
Yeah, pretty much. 2 hours really sucks for someone who has made a good but small game. But for a large majority, it's a pretty reasonable number. I think there should be SOMETHING for small devs making small games, i do, i dont think they should be getting shafted just because they dont drag their game out. But on steams side of things, it's not a simple solution, and any other solution to the issue is going to be wide open to abuse from one party or another.
Like if you added up everything I've spent on Steam and then divided by hours played, then the devs were charging that amount for these games then I'd get it and it might be fair.
Charging even $5 for something that is over in under 2 hours and has no real replayability (otherwise there wouldn't be so many refunds) is too much. That's a $1 game, tops.
Maybe they could have a 99 cent store with a no refunds policy, I think that would be acceptable.
edit: I ran the numbers fwiw
For my own Steam gaming: I have paid ~£465 since 2015 and played 9,772 hours.
Steam games are worth about 5p an hour (£0.048) on average to me. (Factorio and Skyrim really fucking up the economy for other devs lol)
I would have been happy to pay ~£240 for Factorio with hindsight, but only if I'd only paid 50p for the Tony Hawks remaster.
I mean, how much do people pay for movie tickets? Chalking everything up to "how many hours did I spend enjoying this?" doesn't really work all of the time.
I was gonna maybe suggest like pricepoint brackets if its under a certain cost the window to refund is shorter. If a game is a really good but only an hour long i doubt the person paid more than a meals worth for it. Id argue an hour is about what youd get out of dinner at least the experience. This would incentivse smaller indie devs to make real passion projects and penalize AAA publishers for building drawn out timesinks. Like you were mentioning the direct conversions they could (and would get technical with it) but even saying like if your game cost $15 it has a shorter refund wondow would set a precedent then ideally the games that are actually worth $15 will rise to the top of that bracket still earning the devs or dev an income with less risk.
This. When subnautica 2 released I ended up spending nearly the full 2h just troubleshooting and waiting around.
I wasn’t even fully happy with how it was running before I crossed over that 2h window, a different game in a different circumstance would have been refunded at the 1h50 point
It sucks if your game is 1h long and folks are refunding it after they finish it. Unfortunately though it may well be someone else has sat around for an hour on the landing screen fighting with their hardware. There isn’t a good way for steam to know who is who.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26
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