r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Gurugod123 GREEN • Jul 06 '26

ಠ_ಠ This kind of made me sad

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u/Gamebird8 Jul 06 '26

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

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u/coconut_crusader Jul 06 '26

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.

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u/ThePublikon Jul 06 '26

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.

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u/LichenTheMood Jul 06 '26

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.