I think the short games get shorter windows would be completely reasonable. I’m sure that would even show up as a tag in the store, too, so it would be additional info for the buyer as well.
Comment on Indie Dev Says Game Refunded 55,000 Times Via Steam Loophole
iamthetot@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Feels like a tough problem to solve, but I don’t think it’s unsolvable. Maybe the refund window could be shorter for games that report themselves as short/small/micro/whatever. Or ineligible for automatic refunds if you have a certain achievement (this one probably is not a good idea).
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 1 day ago
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
At a high level it is reasonable, but I have been in a situation where I spent over an hour trying to get some buggy early access game to work and was forced to refund it because according to Steam I was running out of “played time” to be entitled to a refund. If I had been assured that I would have still been eligible for a refund I’d have tried some more and maybe not needed said refund. This was especially common when I used an Nvidia GPU in Linux as even being playable on the Steam Deck didn’t mean that my GPU drivers wouldn’t be an issue.
If a short game only had a 30 minute or less refund window, I may avoid buying them at all as it is too high of a risk.
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 19 hours ago
I think that would be solved by making early access games have the normal refund window regardless of length. That seems reasonable as well.
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
I’ve had it happen with standard release games as well, it is just more common.
Really short games are an interesting edge case for Valve’s policy for sure. I don’t personally buy games that are that short, but as long as they are priced accordingly, it feels awfully petty to refund a game that is a few bucks. I just don’t see how much less time you can have to actually try a game and see if it isn’t total garbage. I’ve had plenty of games that didn’t reveal themselves to be completely broken until I was further along (time wise) than that and I was unable to get a refund.
Now with this specific game, I’m not sure it’s an ideal poster child for changes in policy. The game clearly states that it was made in a month and is intentionally “rage inducing”. Maybe the game absolutely sucks, is buggy, or maybe people though “rage inducing” just meant difficult, but in fact, it makes you angry because it is terrible in some other way. This isn’t a shot at the dev, we simply have no way of knowing. All we know is that the dev says he received a review that said they beat it in under two hours and they refunded it after “beating” it. That would indeed sting to read and it seems needlessly petty to even post such a review. The dev himself said that he isn’t necessarily asking for Valve to change the policy.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 1 day ago
And if devs try to game it, I’m sure Valve will kick them off or something. And, yeah, customers could be informed before buying the expected play time so they know what they are getting.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
You wanna get bloat? That’s how you get bloat. Dev you now artificially waste your time to get past the 2 hours mark.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 1 day ago
I’m confused. Doesn’t the current system incentivize what you’re saying?