Slashdot Mirror
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?
"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.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
I hit up HumbleBundle first before buying something through Steam to see if it's available DRM-free. The prices are typically the same and both have their own sales cycles, too.
Also charity and pay-what-you-want bundles, which is nice.
=Smidge=
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.
The steam update specifically says that they do not.
And having VS installed won't give you a VAC ban, or almost every developer would be VAC banned from their own games. There may have been a glitch at one point but every instance I've seen of that gets reverted.
I'm a little skeptical about that. People like to claim that they were improperly banned all the time, but usually once an actual human looks into it the issue it turns out that the person complaining has left out a lot important information that explains why they were banned. Granted, there are a few cases of unjustified bans, typically due to disabled gamers using special hardware that gets them flagged, but a lot of it is people getting busted for cheating and then trying to rally the community behind them for whatever reason.
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What's wrong with short games? Portal is one of the most loved games of all time and it takes only a couple of hours to beat. Are coin-op arcade games devoid of satisfaction? What about short stories versus novels? Should I be entitled to a refund on a banana because it wasn't as filling as a steak dinner?
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.
Not bashing Steam in any way, just keen to promote alternatives and competition.
Moore's law is not a law. Theory, yes; Predictable trend, certainly; Law, no.
Certainly one of the few Steam games I regret buying. 'Oh, look, you just broke your steel pipe by beating half a dozen zombies to death, and now they're respawning thirty seconds after you killed them, and don't even think of moving and turning at the same time unless you want vomit-inducing stutter.'
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.
What about short stories versus novels? Should I be entitled to a refund on a banana because it wasn't as filling as a steak dinner?
Amazon let you return an ebook within seven days for any reason whatsoever, even if you read the whole thing before returning it. Most writers typically see about 1-2% returns, because people who don't want to pay for books can download them from pirate sites instead.
I'm guessing this is driving Valve's refund policy as much as anything, since they're increasingly having to compete with other sites which do have sane policies.
Guilty or not, Valve reserves the right to take away from the user every purchase they have ever made on Steam, for any reason, with no legal recourse. Why anyone would agree to those terms I do not understand.
I'm not VAC banned, and I have all sorts of developer stuff on my computer - Visual studio specifically, as well as some debugger stuff.
On the other hand, I'm also not running that stuff on VAC enabled games either, or cheating otherwise(my lousy record in such games speaks to that).
I don't read AC A human right
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.
Valve is obligated to comply with a law in Germany that guarantees returns of goods bought in the Internet. Luckily for the rest of the world, Valve is extending this consumer-friendly policy to everyone. Hopefully it will work out for developers too. As a consumer I'm very happy about this.