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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.
"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).
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.
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 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
Same reason you have rebate offers instead of sales; they count on a percentage of buyers not bothering.
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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,
I look at reviews (negative in particular - sure I wade through a lot of nutters that I can ignore -- and people will often rate a game negatively for precisely the feature I'm interested in it... but it also surfaces the real complaints), I look at ratings; I look at price. I look at the discussions. And I want some game play footage in the trailer so I know what I'm getting. I don't want cutscenes and crap.
But the one thing I really don't want is to watch someone actually play the game and literally spoil it for me. Secrets revealed, tactics revealed, puzzle solutions revealed, dialog and story revealed. Everything I play games for is ruined by such twitch and lets-play videos.
I'll go back and watch gameplay video of a game I've played afterwards... but not before.
, also to see if they can finish it in one stream session.
That's meta data I'd want in a review.
Limbo for example is a game you can beat in an hour or two? Much less if you know what you are doing.... its still worth playing. But watching someone else play it on twitch pretty much ruins it. Ditto for something like spelunky or binding of isaac... even Wolfenstein or Xcom...
To each there own... but I think your doing it wrong. :)
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.