Were they not aware of the refund policy when they listed their game for sale on the platform?
I guess they didn’t expect people to be such freeloading assholes to play their game in full and then take back their money.
That kind of dumb people are why we have to deal with huge exploitative game companies instead of having more indie devs
I think market capture is the core problem. The fact that any of these storefronts can play kingmaker and supreme arbiter of what gets released is what discourages indie releases. We are very lucky that the gaming industry ended up under the stewardship of a relatively benevolent company, but if the global economic stage remains as it is, the minute Gabe dies or relinquishes control of the company, I suspect it will shoot like a bullet to the bottom of the barrel with all the other publishers. It’s not a good situation.
How about all the people who bought it without even playing? This is a even larger number than the refunders.
This indie dev made a hit game that sold pretty well btw.
I have to imagine this was this risk the developer should have considered when making a game shorter than the return window.
The platform shouldn’t have to intervene because the developer didn’t properly evaluate risk when releasing the game
No understanding of art here.
If it’s being made for art, then who cares if it’s being returned or not. It’s being enjoyed. If you want to capitalize on your art then you need to take the trade off of it getting returned if your artistic vision is shorter than the return window
Maybe not in this particular case: but what if you buy a game intending to get 10 hours out of it and after 1h you get greeted by the final credits. Shouldn’t you not be able to refund then? (Depending on the price of course.)
Depends if the game set some expectation for a 10 hour long campaign or not I’d say.
I tried Buckshot Roulette on gamepass last night. That would 100% be getting refunded if it was anything more than 50p.
You’re supposed to escape. And then get the white telephone. That takes many hours.
Yeah thats game was annoyingly short. I wouldnt blame anyone for refunding it.
id feel like i got fuckin ripped off if it was an hour long, this isn’t a complicated game and even with the low price id refund it. then again id never buy this game in the first place cuz i already hold that view point.
Easy fix: have a two-hour intro video that you can’t skip ;-)
Kojima: “what’s so special about that?”
“Only two hours? Oh man ive wasted so much effort…”
yah that deff won’t make the review bombing worse…
It’s going to be a tiny minority of people doing that, but there probably ought to be a basic check to see if you got the achievement for completing the game before letting you refund it. Maybe not for YouTube rageslop like this, but for the smaller “experience” games, like Unpacking or something.
Realistically a lot of people are treating the refund system as a demo. I know on PS+ there’s the option on a lot of games to play it for two hours before having to buy it. I guess the PC is a bit too open to allow for that. Could offer that by playing it in the nebulous “cloud” I suppose.
It seems like a pretty simple fix within the control of the publisher. If your game has less content than will fill the return window, you risk this kind of loss due to the tiny size of your product. It is a product that this market does not bear. Tolerate it or make more content before release.
It’s a game that costs £2.39.
On sale**
$5 otherwise
Then it’s a product that this market does not bear. They must tolerate it or make more content.
It really is a tiny minority. A handful of reviews said they did it specifically for that. That’s it.
If you’re planning to refund a game. Just pirate it
You have to trust the source where you download to pirate it.
Just gotta find a decent private tracker and keep your ratio good.
I mean I have a hard time trusting hacked and pirated games, that they do not contain anything harmful. It’s been a long time since I pirated a PC game. We talk about Windows XP from my experience here. xD
if theyre also review bombing its cuz its not good, friend slop became a term for a reason and its likely being applied here.
Tagging the official Steam account, Covic wrote on X, “This should not be possible. Would be cool if you could finally do something about your refund policy… Got dozens of reviews like that and 21% refund rate even though the reviews are 90% very positive… That’s over 55,000 Refunds btw.”
The review bombing happened after he contacted steam regarding the multitudes of people refunding the game after completing it
ah, ok.
If you refund an indy game that you completed, you’re a sociopath and there’s no helping you. There isn’t a structural system that’s going to prevent that, some people are complete human garbage
It should be easy enough to implement a refundability window based on either time-in-game or percentage completion (based on main story line, not side quests and diversions).
I mean if the game says 20 hours of gameplay but you complete it in an hour, that’s false advertising and there should be an exception. But if a game says it takes an hour to complete and you complete it in an hour, there’s no reason why you should be able to get that refunded.
Ok, sure. I think we’re missing the forest for the trees here though
What’s the forest in this case, and what are the trees?
Are the trees the individual cases of refund abuse, and the forest is the culture of unmitigated refund abuse?
Cause if so, I don’t see how my comment was missing the forest for the trees…
In fact, yours was the one focused on individual cases and claiming there’s no larger unifying structure that can be addressed…
It’s not just the playing it, enjoying it, and then refunding it. It’s the bragging about it on the fucking platform. Kind of asshole who does that. Well, that’s gaming culture these days.
Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I’m bored, to watch Yahtzee’s reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I’ve not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.
I thought “sounds curious, maybe I’ll search for some full reviews of that to see what it’s like”…
Ho. Lee. Hell.
There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.
On the bright side, my “never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos” commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I’m old enough that this shit wasn’t ubiquitous when I was impressionable.
I understand your desire to not use youtube, but you are missing out on The Spiffing Brit and Let’s Game it Out
If you aren’t familiar, they are game breakers. Spiffing brit tends toward grand strategy games, and finds balance issues in them for a living best I can tell, and lets game it out griefs NPCs and systems to see how much abuse a game can take and what sort of tomfoolery he can manage. He tends toward very complex base building and mining type games.
Even if neither of those genres are your thing to play (they aren’t really mine), the channels are funny as hell and totally enjoyable.
I’ll add that noclip (and their second channel noclip_2 are excellent for games journalism /documentaries.
And CallMeKevin has been doing wholesome video game content (and other things) for about 10 years.
Genuinely, thank you both for the suggestions. I’m just wary of falling down the YouTube rabbithole - I refuse to even log-in to the damned site - so if I start watching one of them it’s going to have to be one I can remember the name of to search ;-).
(I thought Facebook was a bad idea from the get-go and never signed up, quit Instagram when FB bought them, quit Twitter when that asshole bought them… Lemmy and (sorry to say) Reddit are literally my only social media, and I question both of them fairly regularly. I do not claim to be normal ;-).)
The only reason I make an exception for Yahtzee is that having had a Steam account since Half-Life 2, Steam nevertheless remains comically bad at recommending games I’d be remotely interested in. Yahtzee’s reviews I often don’t agree with, but they do at least give me a hint of things I should check out.
Thats a super fair stance.
Consider looking into something like freetube (pc, there might also be apps for android that do the same, I don’t know) Its logged in as an anonymous account so you can subscribe to stuff, but you can go into the settings and disable all the distractions, which is what they call everything thats not videos :) All I ever see is stuff from my subscribed channels, and if I go into the individual channels, the only thing that remains is the main videos feed, everything else (about, shorts, community, etc.) is disabled. I also have sponsor block enabled to auto-skip all promotional content including self-promo.
The algorithm is basically non-existent on freetube, in that your recommendations feed on the side of the video player is going to be mostly the same channel you are watching now, not just random shit. Maybe a few things thrown in that are closely related -like if they work with another channel a lot that other channel might come up- maybe some weird bug videos that aren’t related at all, but those are all semi-sciency so that could be from my own watching, idk, I think the dev included some basic channels for the main feed so it wasn’t empty, they don’t really change and I’ve had other people mention seeing the exact same videos in their feed, years apart. I haven’t seen much, if any, questionable or undesirable content without explicitly searching for it, though.
I find the distraction-free mode of using it to be very much like back in the day when you had to know what you wanted because there was no algorithm. Its not addictive or changing my opinions, imo, because I genuinely struggle to find new channels, what with no algorithm shoving shit down my throat, so I get what I’m looking for and nothing else. I check it a couple times a month, quickly run out of new content, get bored, and go do something else. Perhaps thats a workable option for you, as well :)
Thank you! I see it has a Linux version, so I will genuinely check that out - as soon as I get home. (As I write I’m waiting to board the first of 13 hours or so of flights - that’s why I happened to be checking out gaming reviews yesterday ;-). I’m hoping the 7th Guest remake will keep me sane…)
If you refund an indy game that you completed, you’re a sociopath and there’s no helping you.
Y’all standards are in the gutter. Completing a game does not mean you’re obligated to keep it.
If you did not have fun, or if the game does not meet your expectations for replayability, the responsible financial decision is to refund it.
Whether it’s indie or not is irrelevant. The world economy is shit, and, consumers or indie developers, everyone is struggling alike.
I understand you’re going after people with money to spare who maliciously do this, but that sentence is not it.
“I finished my plate but I actually hated it so I demand a refund” is what you sound like.
You complaining about the economy while you NOT pay artists for their work is why you’re a spciopath
Atp just pirate it and don’t brag about refunding the game in the reviews of the game you just completed, liked and deemed enjoyable
But what if it sucked? You can easily rage-complete a bad game within the refund window.
Except most people said that they liked the game, left a good review and still refunded it, makes no sense
That sounds like something for people who like being angry, in which case I’d argue the sense of defeating the game is the enjoyment you got out of it.
But Jesus, just pirate. Get off steam
Who keeps playing a game they don’t like? Why would you do that to yourself?
I rarely do that, but when I do, it’s not a case of too boring (those I just forget about entirely). It’s the kind of game that feels so wrong I just have to see how bad it gets.
Okamiden on the DS is my go-to example. Absolute fan of the original, but I finished that pseudosequel in one long, angry session.
Another would be Pokémon Pearl. Terribly balanced with the most tedious world to traverse I’ve experienced in a Pokémon game. It was part of a gen 4 to gen 7 playthrough with dex transfer so I committed to it. Black, Z, Alpha Sapphire, Moon? Yeah, had fun with all of them. Pearl was complete ass.
If the meal is bad, don’t finish it and then ask for a refund.
There’s nuance here. If it’s ‘bad’ as in like the meat is still raw, or there’s a lump of the chef’s hair wadded up in it, then yeah it’s refund time.
If it’s ‘bad’ as in they made it properly but you didn’t like it, just suck it up and don’t order it next time. It’s good to try new things, but you can’t expect all of them to be a banger. The number of people I’ve seen punish the restaurant for giving them exactly what they asked for is kinda bonkers.
It’s only a 2 hour window. I think very reasonable that you might play a game for 90 minutes and then at the end say “wait, that’s it‽ That’s not worth $x!”
Imagine eating a meal for two hours and then when the bill comes say “that’s it?”
I get that you might expect more. I felt that way about Cyberpunk. I’d barely got going, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I still liked it.
And I dunno the fact that it’s indies doesn’t count for nothing in my books. I’d say go case by case, but generally I agree with the indie dev that it’s scummy and I don’t support it.
rage-complete
This is the sociopathy.
Sociopathy is not typically linked with emotion, no.
rage-complete
This is the sociopathy.
This is the sociopathy.
If you try a new flavor of chips and hate them do you take them back to the store for a refund? If they were stale, sure. If the game was buggy as hell and didn’t run right I’d say submit for a refund.
Depends how bad. But I wouldn’t complete it if it was bad enough to return
A lot of products used to say “satisfaction guaranteed”. So you could literally return products you had consumed. I don’t know how many people did that though.
Most of those guarantees involve mailing your receipt and the proof of purchase to the company along with a letter explaining how you were not satisfied before they will get around to mailing you a check for the $4.73 in 8-12 weeks.
Some of them went over the top the try to ‘make it right’. Dude I went to highschool with did this shit almost like it was a hobby. He’d call the customer support line and complain about whatever bullshit he could come up with - gummy lump in his drink, hard flake in his bag of chips that 'might have been a fingernail!… they’d take his number and address, and that was usually the end of it.
Then occasionally a box would randomly show up at his front door with like 50 bottles of soda or candy bars or w/e, and a letter apologizing for the trouble lol.
Manipulative little shit. And that was when we were like 14 years old… dude’s probably running his own organized crime ring nowadays. xD
Yes, so Steam is better and more consumer friendly than them.
I swear to Glob, another one that compares this situation to eating food. We’ve had that in another thread already. You could compare it to watching a movie maybe, but how are you people always going for the food comparison?
It’s more active than just watching something, like you’ve constantly got to drive the experience forward and so decide whether to continue.
But yeah I’ve also walked out of movies and got a refund. I wouldn’t do it after the movie though
Lol “you people.” This whole comment section needs a cold shower.
Most stores around here don’t accept food refunds unless they’re unopened or completely covered in mold.
One time I returned a single coconut because the inside was completely moldy and the lady behind me accused me of drinking the water and returning the flesh… I was like lady I have a job i don’t even care about the 2 bucks. I just figured how else are they going to know that they got a bunch of bad coconuts if I don’t come leave a record. Im not trying to run a scam for moldy fruit water.
She actually said that makes sense and dropped it but I was shocked… like you really think someone laundering coconut water one fuzzy nut at a time?
The perfect crime…
I think you’re getting lost in the weeds here, friend
If it aucked and you experienced that whole piece of art you don’t get your money back. You don’t get your money back for a bad movie my guy.
Art gallery’s don’t give refunds and they ALL suck.
OPERA IS A REAL THING
I’ll confess I did this once – with Duke Nukem Forever. My old best bud and I played the fuck out of Duke3D back in the day (including building our own levels) and 3DRealms cockteased everyone for well over a decade with their supposed ‘ultimate’ title. So when it finally released I HAD to play it. And of course there was no way it could live up to the hype. It was an inconsistent mess and I powered through it in under 2 hours. I guess I’m glad I played it but it wasn’t even remotely revolutionary… At beast or was like a collection of fan mods bundled into an ‘official’ title. Not at all worth the asking price. I have no desire to revisit any of it so overall I don’t feel like I ripped them off; if anything I feel like they disappointed me majorly as a fan.
I played it so others don’t have to. Yeah, that’s how I’ll spin it 😂
If your game is so short that users can finish it without prior knowledge in less then 2h, you’re doing something wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, 2 hours for a game is hella short, but too many games want me to spend hundreds of hours on them and just aren’t good enough to justify that kind of time investment. The best games respect your time imo.
agreed, this is just a friendslop game. at least it has the decency to be only a few dollars
The people who legitimately do this are the ones who make the rest of the gamers look bad.
If you bought a game, especially for $3, played it from start to finish over the course of an hour and a half, and then bragged about it when you refunded it. You fully deserve to have your refund capability disabled.
The thing is, though, I don’t really know a way that this can be implemented without allowing publishers to game the system. I do personally think that Two Hours is a little generous for the overall story because I will generally know whether or not I’m going to like a game within 35 minutes of playing.
I think a good alternative to it is have your refund window be based off of the current sale price of the game.
So for a game that’s less than five bucks, you would only have somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour of a refund window.
Then for your typical indie window, which would be like fifteen to thirty dollars, you have an hour to hour and a half then your AAA title pricing of ~60, you have two or three hours.
I can understand refunding a game if it’s broken on your system or just trash, but it feels real sleazy to me to spend money on a game, play it to completion, and then refund it anyway.
This would only work if the game participates in regional pricing, otherwise you’re fucking over most people who don’t deal in USD. $15 to you is not just $15 to everyone else.
I don’t see how this would be too much of an issue. If it’s that way in one region, then it would be unilateral all across all regions. Price wouldn’t really matter at that point as long as you’re using the same guideline
This might sound dumb but why not have it so that if you get the achievement for beating the game you can’t refund it?
That would be too easy to game or abuse by the devs
I suspect a big goal of this refund policy is to make steam self moderating. Valve don’t want to have to police individual games more than absolutely necessary.
If devs can game it by giving players the completion achievement the moment they launch the game, suddenly valve has to step in to solve the problem, and they are far too busy enjoying their enormous profits to actually do work
I feel like only the really dodgy games would do that, it would be a very blatant exploitation of the system. Just have a section in the refund request that says “the game gave me the achievement erroneously” or something and then you can look into it if there’s enough reports. Yes Steam has to step in occasionally, but that’s inevitable unless you’re happy with one side or the other getting screwed.
Like would any real game by a publisher do this? It’d tank their reputation by a huge amount. A lot of gamers care a huge amount about achievements so to get the 100% achievement on boot would actually really annoy them too. I just don’t see it happening.
The only other solution I can think of is for developers to just never release a game that can be completed in under 2 hours. Which is just silly.
What if it was 10% of achievements or something then? Then it would be extremely obvious if someone got a bunch all at startup
I think we might just need to make steam employees actually work, I’m sorry, there’s no easy away around it.
They still get to massively profit off of the huge cuts their platform takes though, obviously
Dang. Actually hiring like 1 human? What a travesty
It largely depends on the type of game. There’s are plenty of games I’ve played where you’re still in the tutorial after 2 hours. Hell, I don’t think I knew if I liked EU4 until I was like 50+ hours in.
You don’t need 2 hours to figure out if you like Super Meat Boy though. You’ll know in less than an hour. Probably less than that.
For those who wonder how you could play a game for 50+ hours and not know if you like it; it’s a grand strategy game with lots of functionally. A full game can easily be 50+ hours depending on how fast you let the game run, and your first game is definitely going to have a lot of pausing trying to figure out various functionality. First game is or two is just figuring out the basic gameplay.
If you play a game for 50+ hours, you liked it. You don’t spend that amount of time being undecided.
You’d be wrong. Though you could say I didn’t hate it at least. But I certainly hadn’t made up my mind yet.
I played the first game with a friend. Which is largely why I even finished it. It’s pretty overwhelming because you’re left to figure out a lot on your own. Second game I played on my own. After that is when I knew I liked it, or at least toward the end of that second game.
I can’t think of anything other than grand strategy games that I’ve been that indecisive over. Everything else has been within like 3 hours. Some barely even 20 minutes.
Nah, you liked it. You don’t keep going back to a game for 50 hours if you don’t like it. Most people don’t even put 50 hours into games they like.
I agree. We’re not discussing “liking a game” in the context of whether or not it deserves 5 stars; we’re talking about whether or not you’re going to demand a refund. There’s clothing I regretted buying after 50 hours of wear, but by that point I’ve taken off the tag and it’s gone through a laundry cycle. I’d be considered trashy to take that back to the store even if within the return window.
Oh I get you there.
I played The Witcher 3 for over a hundred hours and didn’t realize I didn’t like it until I went to have a threesome with Triss and Yennefer and instead got left with blue balls.
I would have returned that game right then and there if I could have.
Maybe have a new rule for shorter games, like if its reasonable to complete the game normally in under 5 hours then the 2 hour window should be 1 hour or even 30 minutes. Idk how games are submitted but it should be an option at that time on how long the game is or a question about if its over or under x hours long so they know how to treat the game for this policy.
Enough rules, enough automations, I say, just make steam actually hire some real customer service humans. What? They can’t afford it?
That’s where the abuse comes in, because how can you be sure a developer won’t make a short game and list it as 20hrs to complete?
A dev that is abusing the system is going to be delisted by Valve real quick, methinks.
I mean databases like howlongtobeat.com do exist. Steam could also come up with their own numbers by looking at the average playtime when players get the achievement for winning the game.
Issue with both is, the game needs to already have been released and beaten a few times.A developer can still game an achievement.
its a Unity game eww
So is Ori and the Blind Forest.
tey think the old ceo is still in charge, some people only listen to outrage news.
I hate Unity >:)
The engine or the games made therein?
Cuz if you dislike Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Ori and the Blind Forest, Dead Cells, Subnautica, Valheim, Rust, Hearthstone, Slay the Spire, Cities: Skylines, Among Us, Fall Guys, Overcooked… then I’d say your taste in games is next to shit.
the engine
Ok fair, I’ve heard Unity has become sort of a pain in the ass to work with. I just couldn’t believe anyone could dislike Subnatica lol.
Good for you.
Some gaming consumers are just easily directed cattle for rage stampedes about whatever. No time for comprehension, just get the pitch forks and go burn some shit down!
Similar theme but different story was that guy who distributes a VR “mod” for various games, including Cyberpunk 2077. The nuanced part is a big chunk of it is in proprietary libraries that are independent of the games it provides VR support for. Just look at what PrayDog had to do to get VR support for just Unreal games https://github.com/praydog/UEVR/tree/master and that other guy has made a toolset that works with multiple engines. Charging at most a one time patreon fee for an unlocked copy doesn’t sound that greedy.
Another one was the more muted whining that Valheim’s Iron Gate has cheated everyone by doing “the bare minimum” to be Early Access and are abandoning an unfinished game with Valheim’s 1.0 release. Personally I think those people are fucking insane.
Forty years ago I was at a cross roads that would have led to me being a programmer in the gaming industry. Really glad I didn’t choose that as the game industry culture is absolutely exhausting.
Honestly that game looks pretty fun, especially as a two player game. Just keep it after you beat it and play it with someone else. Or play it again at varying levels of inebriation.
keep in mind, its partially overblown because according to the acheivements, only 7% users have actually beat the game of the people who kept it. the people who refunded shouldnt be that different than the average.
most of the people refunding are more likely people who rage quit more than people who beat the game in 2 hours
not saying its not an. ass move to refund but the people who refunded arent statisically the people who beat it.
only 7% users have actually beat the game of the people who kept it. the people who refunded shouldnt be that different than the average
You would need data to show this hypothesis to be true, you can’t assume it, the variables are not independent, that’s the whole point being made.
while i can’t entirely assume it, you cannot assume that the people refunded are drastically better than the people who didn’t, especially when the dev puts out the 55k refund numbers. if hes going to claim 55k refunds, he needs to show that 55k (or a majority of those) actually beat the game and refunded in under 2 hours, else hes bundling a bunch of people who simply ragequit and likely legitimately refunded the game. The debate ultimately comes up because he happen to tie the 55k number on the same post as showing the comment that someone beat the game and refunded. Thats the equivalent of going somewhere, finding one thing to support your cause, and saying everything there supported it without actually checking.
But all games have a rate of refunds, including refunds due to rage quitting. Our null hypothesis should be that the refund rate should be the same as any other game (controlling for difficulty).
I don’t know what a normal rate of refunds is, that is probably data that is out there. But if the refund rate for this game is significantly higher than normal, then we can say that SOMETHING about this game is different.
If we control for every factor besides hltb, and it’s still higher, only then could we say with high confidence that the difference is due to people finishing and refunding. But we technically can’t ever say that with 100% certainty unless we go to every person’s house and watch them do it.
the game is intentionally designed around being frustrating, due to controls, and especially since it was designed to be done in coop, as it came from a period of time like carry the glass or chained together was. It’s not like conventional hard game like thrown into elden ring with no souls experience hard, but intentionally difficult games like those in the Foddian category like baby steps, pogostuck and such. they’re intentionally hard, and theyre intentionally designed to fuck with the player, far more than a typical game would.
Its a very similar vein as modern hard vs “nintendo hard” in the past because games werent hard to be hard, they were hard because of intentional design decisions to prevent users from renting a game and beating it, and to prolong game value
You’re just making me wanna play this game lol
Apart from the people saying that’s exactly what they did, which is what this is about.
hence exageration, as the majority probably never finished, and its more scrutinized on the people who did. When you bring up the refund rate, then a specific comment doing the refund, that’s pushing a narrative to the passive reader that they are one in the same when only a fraction of said 55k actually have completed the game in under 2 hours.
If valve for example stepped in and punished those few that actually beat the game and refunded, the dev would probably get a miniscule amount back. (and don’t get me wrong, I think they shouldn’t be refunded) Then you go towards the question that comes up in the debate that are you really going to deny people who didn’t even finish the game, a refund? If you are, that would just be another checkbox in the steadily growing debate between consumer vs developer debate
