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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.
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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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.
My personal issue is with removing GFWL when that was the specific reason I bought them. My hobby is getting Xbox live achievements and ~30 of the 44 GFWL games I purchased were through Steam. Everything would have been fine if I had the choice of when to apply patches but Steam forces them on you either through auto-updates or on launch. GFWL has been stripped out of a half dozen of them and another half dozen are "update pending" so that if I ever launch them again they get patched too. This is compounded by the fact that Steam, along with these patches, included a patch of their own which removes the product key from your system. This prevents you from using your key to activate a pirated copy to restore what you'd originally purchased.
That specific scenario aside, the bigger picture is that any update can remove/change any feature at any time. Something you love about a product can simply vanish and you have no recourse. I was reading about an early access game (Starforge) that did just that and had the balls to try and sell some of it as DLC. The early access factor meant they couldn't really complain but there's nothing stopping any developer from doing that sort of thing at any time with any content.