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.

Comments

Yet...

[JMJimmy]

They refuse to refund after forcing patches on users which remove functionality from them.

Fears of abuse are overblown

[Galaga88]

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.