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

Put some content in your damn game

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

The "review bombing" is already happening.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.