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Valve Introduces Steam Refunds In Advance of Summer Sale
Deathspawner writes: Despite all of its competition, Valve's Steam service remains the most popular digital PC game store around. While Steam does do a lot of things right, it can sometimes stumble in the worst of ways. Look no further than April's Skyrim mod debacle as a good example. Well, just as Valve fixed up that issue, it's gone ahead and fixed another: it's making refunds dead simple. While refunds have been possible in the past, it's required gamers to jump through hoops to get them. Now, Valve has set certain criteria for granting a refund, no questions asked: if you've bought the game within the past two weeks and played it for two hours or less, your refund is guaranteed.
The changes are being welcomed by most, but not all: some developers of smaller games that take less time to play through are worried that this will lead to abuse, and the system may enable more risk-free review-bombing as well.
They refuse to refund after forcing patches on users which remove functionality from them.
We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.
why not just have an 7-14 day price guarantee with an auto refund?
You mean GOG, who only just released a client and generally are far less focuses on new titles and Origin that is universally derided.
Steam has no competition.
"The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store."
They have some specific additional requirements for DLC, but it definitely applies to games (as I read it).
Not our fault you can't read.
The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store.
Sometimes, I look at a game, and I'm partially interested, but I don't buy. Or I wait for 3 years until its on sale for 99 cents. Because I've been burned by too many bad games, and you can never get refunds from software (traditionally)
If I could get a refund, I'd be more likely to try something that I'm borderline interested in. If it turns out to be a ripoff, I'll get my money back. Which should help discourage people who are putting crapware on steam. And, if it's a good indie game, but completely not what I expected, and I just don't like it, I'll get my money back.
But, otoh, if it's a decent game, I'll keep it. In the end, this may promote more sales than it hurts. And it may mean I try + buy some indie games at $5 instead of waiting and getting them years later for $1.
Seems like the only ones who loose are devs who release really buggy games, or ppl who put up crap in hopes of making a quick buck.
"The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store."
It is right on the http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds page
Developers of smaller games are afraid people will buy, finish, refund? Put more than 2 hours of content in your game. Your game sucks. Sell your game for $2 and lobby Skype to not refund games costing less than $2 or something.
I spent $50 for a game that took 80 hours to complete the first time and can be completed in 6 by a highly-skilled player skipping all the dialogue after months of practice. A highly-knowledgeable player can do it in like 20. A casual player can do it in probably 30 in a rush, and often may take 40 hours to figure it all out blind. This is the story of almost every fucking game I've bought--not just JRPGs, but Ocarina of Time, Metroid Prime, Crash fucking Bandacoot, Unepic, etc. Metroid Fusion stood out to me when I beat it 4 hours after opening it--I was disappointed. Nibelumbra took 2 hours to beat, and cost $7; but then it gets out of the narrative-slash-tutorial and dumps an obscenely difficult second quest on you.
If your game is shorter than 2 hours, it shouldn't cost enough to be worth refunding.
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Generally speaking, it's the exact opposite of what you wrote.
Items and DLCs are excluded.
It talks about DLCs only in a separate section after this sentence: "The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store. Here is an overview of how refunds work with other types of purchases."
Mayhaps you didn't read TFA?
You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason.
The section for DLC is merely clarifying different rules that may apply to it.
The people behind some of the smaller games get their friends to give positive reviews to the point where reviews are basically worthless on Steam.
Let's be honest here, if somebody's going to go through the effort of buying the game, playing through it in under two hours, then requesting a refund, couldn't they have much more easily just torrented it? That cuts out the entire pay for it, request for refund, wait for refund step. If hey can complete your game in under two hours, it's probably an indie title with little or no DRM so finding a pirate copy isn't even hard.
I just requested a refund on Lego Worlds which I bought yesterday. It looks like it might one day be a fun game, but right now it's impossible to remap the WASD keys to something that a left-handed player would want. I searched the forums and tried to find a workaround, but decided that the seven minutes I played the game struggling to do anything much was below the 2 hour limit so I requested a refund.
When you request a refund you have the option of 'steam credit' or a chargeback to your credit card. It's nice that they're not trapping your money within their accounting system.
Steam is the most effective anti-piracy tool ever conceived. Adding refunds removes yet another reason to pirate - wanting to try a game out before dropping cash on it, because games often fail to live up to the hype. If I can get a refund that's one less reason to pirate.
Still prefer GOG, but you have to hand it to Gabe and Pals.
Wonder if they refund for VAC bans. From what I've read, it doesn't take that much to trigger VAC, and it may have almost nothing to do with actual cheating.
To protect my account, I run any Steam stuff on an external SSD in an enclosure... a separate OS install(not a VM, since there are posts about VAC bans initiated due to the program detecting VMWare files.) Yes, anti-cheat measures are good, but the chance of losing access to paid for items for something like Visual Studio installed doesn't give me warm fuzzies.
Emphasis added
Nina Freeman, designer of brief, heartfelt experiences How Do You Do It, Freshman Year, and the upcoming Cibele agreed, adding that Steam kinda generally makes things tough for smaller games.
“What I find most insulting is just how little respect Steam seems to have for smaller games,” she said. “They also don’t let you write reviews for games that you’ve played for less than five minutes. So like, I put freshman year on Steam, and it barely has reviews because no one wants to play such a sad thing twice just to write a review. They basically just keep doing things that say they don’t care about small games succeeding on their platform, which is bad because they’re one of the biggest and most important platforms for releasing games.”
Here's another:
However, Jack King-Spooner, creator of countless art games—recently released game about his hometown in Scotland, Beeswing, most prominent among them—views this as better than nothing at all.
“It does make it a bit like a free rental for wee games, doesn’t it?” he said. “But I think it is better than not having any refund policy at all. I think that if people want to scam a game for free, they’ll work it out one way or another.” As for worries about Beeswing specifically: “No one really bought it anyway so doesn’t bother me.”
So, basically, this "free rental" problem is only an issue if you make crappy little artsy "games" rather than real games. Well, boo hoo.
While of course there's always room for improvement, i applaud Steam, they always seem to be the ones closer to the customers, i'm pretty sure that will pay off on the long run
Because not everyone will return a game that just dropped in price (or even be aware of the price drop), and Steam gets to keep the difference for the people who don't.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I think the main reason behind this policy is EU law on refunds. Both GOG and Origin have a refund policy, and have for some time, though it seems Steam's policy is more favorable to costumers. A two week refund has been common in Europe for many years. I don't see how to handle abuses of this new policy is any different than any other business that has to deal with refunds.
Biggest fraud in the gaming world ever.
some developers of smaller games that take less time to play through are worried that this will lead to abuse
You mean the pay-to-play and the pay-to-win developers then?
These days I tend to watch gamers on twitch play a new game before I commit to see if I will enjoy the game play, also to see if they can finish it in one stream session.
Same reason you have rebate offers instead of sales; they count on a percentage of buyers not bothering.
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I quit buying anything from Steam after their mandatory binding arbitration dick move. Now I might give it a go again, since I have two weeks to tell them there's issues and I want my money back.
This would've been nice a few Christmas sales ago. During one such sale I bought Fallout:New Vegas and then 5 minutes later noticed that the Game of the Year edition with all of the DLC was just a couple dollars more. I asked for a refund so I could buy the GotY edition with everything, Valve's rep told me no. So I had to buy the DLC separately for even more money. If they had this refund in place back then I could've saved money. Instead I had to pay more money and my opinion of Valve went down.
There are many games I refuse to buy because they don't have a playable demo. In fact, there are very few games I will fork over cash for without trying it out first.
This makes all games effectively have free demos...so I am more likely to look at and possibly titles that I would otherwise have ignored.
It would be nice if the guaranteed refunds were automatic. I bought a game about a week ago played it for about 10 minutes and hated the controls. When this program launched yesterday I asked for a refund and though it is "guaranteed" I still have not received a response from steam support.
The only reason people did not try games below the top 5 is that they could not return it. This puts an end to EA/Blizard/Activision monopoly. I am looking forward to the small gaming shops finally making their fair share
GFWL was *removed* by the patch. In other words, HE didn't decide to remove it. MS didn't decide to remove it. Steam aren't running GFWL, but they're "removing support" for it. It's not their fucking game!
numerous times to Steam because some game had some extra bullshit requirement like GFWL that wasn't listed on the store page.
I was very surprised - and after reading the entire ToS update - delighted when I opened Steam when I got home from work last night. I'm anti-drm but Steam does have some benefits and I've had an account for over a decade with hundreds of games and only a handful of problems.
I'm glad they're doing this and frankly it should have been their stance from the beginning, they've been notoriously tight-assed about refunds.
If anyone knows why they suddenly changed their very old and anti-consumer policy to this far better one I'd love to hear it.
Or they introduce a game as a pre-release, and it's awesome. Then they introduce a bunch of pay-to-win crap, or break the game in other ways when it's released as a completed product. People see a new game come out, see awesome reviews, and buy it... but at this point what *was* a good game is now a steaming pile of sh**...
I've seen many games that seem to have gone this route... although to be fair many are FTPPTW (Free to Play Pay to Win) so the only thing you really waste before seeing it's a PTW piece of junk is time and bandwidth.
I don't see a lot of abuse potential here. If somebody is returning a large percentage of their games, why would Valve want them as a customer? It would be a money losing proposition. Big physical retailers track this stuff. Amazon does as well. It's an easy form or abuse to ferret out.
As a victim of Valve's previous refund policy (bought game which simply didn't work on my system, which they knew, but would not issue a refund, and ended up needing to charge back the purchase on my cc, resulting in a ban of that cc from Steam and much consternation), I think this is a great change. It boggles my mind that the previous policy and mechanism was so broken, and so doubly-punishing to victims of bug-riddled software.
a better way would be if you could download the entire game and play it for 2 hours for free. if you still like it, then pay the price.
why not? steam already controls your library anyway, so should be easy enough to do and seems an easier method then this (too much hassle).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...