all this will do is discourage an obviously talented developer from ever publishing another game.
good job gamers, you're just as toxic as everyone believes you are.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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How about all the people who bought it without even playing? This is a even larger number than the refunders.
This indie dev made a hit game that sold pretty well btw.
Were they not aware of the refund policy when they listed their game for sale on the platform?
I guess they didn't expect people to be such freeloading assholes to play their game in full and then take back their money.
That kind of dumb people are why we have to deal with huge exploitative game companies instead of having more indie devs
I think market capture is the core problem. The fact that any of these storefronts can play kingmaker and supreme arbiter of what gets released is what discourages indie releases. We are very lucky that the gaming industry ended up under the stewardship of a relatively benevolent company, but if the global economic stage remains as it is, the minute Gabe dies or relinquishes control of the company, I suspect it will shoot like a bullet to the bottom of the barrel with all the other publishers. It's not a good situation.
I guess they didn't expect people to be such freeloading assholes to play their game in full and then take back their money.
Have they even given evidence that their game is significantly more refunded than any other game? Or did they see X amount of people refunding the game and declaring that they must have done it because they're evil?
Well, yea. Giving great reviews and then refunding, as one example.
As if a good review alone was payment enough
Maybe not in this particular case: but what if you buy a game intending to get 10 hours out of it and after 1h you get greeted by the final credits. Shouldn't you not be able to refund then? (Depending on the price of course.)
Depends if the game set some expectation for a 10 hour long campaign or not I'd say.
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(4 replies)
According to all the statistics I have ever seen, especially from devs who've made short games, this isn't an actual problem.
Almost like you could check the reviews and realize there are serious problems with using co-op in a game that is designed for co-op
If you refund an indy game that you completed, you're a sociopath and there's no helping you. There isn't a structural system that's going to prevent that, some people are complete human garbage
It's not just the playing it, enjoying it, and then refunding it. It's the bragging about it on the fucking platform. Kind of asshole who does that. Well, that's gaming culture these days.
Literally the only reason I ever use YouTube other than KPop^* videos is very occasionally, if I'm bored, to watch Yahtzee's reviews. Last night I tuned in and a game I've not heard of before, Mixtape, got mentioned.
I thought "sounds curious, maybe I'll search for some full reviews of that to see what it's like"...
Ho. Lee. Hell.
There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of "game reviews". I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It's absolutely revolting, whatever it is.
On the bright side, my "never, ever use YouTube for anything other than music videos" commitment is redoubled. I am so glad I'm old enough that this shit wasn't ubiquitous when I was impressionable.
[^*]: now KPop fandom is a whole other kind of mental; I take solace in mot being able to understand most of it. Ignorance is bliss.
There seems to be an entire genre on YouTube of absolutely godawful human beings just being fucking horrible in the guise of “game reviews”. I mean, just really unpleasant people who within about 30 seconds you know would be domestic abusers if they ever met a girl. Is this the edge of the manosphere? It’s absolutely revolting, whatever it is.
This has always been a problem in the gaming community, but it's been especially rampant for the last decade or so since Steve Bannon identified gamers as a demographic (largely comprised of insecure teenage boys) that is particularly susceptible to fascist messaging and threw money into signal-boosting the worst of it, and a bunch of impressionable dumbfucks went along with it.
I understand your desire to not use youtube, but you are missing out on The Spiffing Brit and Let’s Game it Out
If you aren't familiar, they are game breakers. Spiffing brit tends toward grand strategy games, and finds balance issues in them for a living best I can tell, and lets game it out griefs NPCs and systems to see how much abuse a game can take and what sort of tomfoolery he can manage. He tends toward very complex base building and mining type games.
Even if neither of those genres are your thing to play (they aren’t really mine), the channels are funny as hell and totally enjoyable.
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(5 replies)
Y’all standards are in the gutter. Completing a game does not mean you’re obligated to keep it.
If you did not have fun, or if the game does not meet your expectations for replayability, the responsible financial decision is to refund it.
Whether it’s indie or not is irrelevant. The world economy is shit, and, consumers or indie developers, everyone is struggling alike.
I understand you’re going after people with money to spare who maliciously do this, but that sentence is not it.
To whoever replied to my original comment (I don't understand how OC can call me a sociopath, block me, and make my comment disappear, but whatever) and likened playing a game and refunding it to refunding a meal you ate: you can't re-eat a meal but you can replay a game.
Most shmups you can beat in less than 30 minutes with continues, but the fun is replayability. If it's not replayable, it's not worth the money, unless it's appropriately priced.
I'm honestly tired of people who inhale 1-hour walking simulators on daily basis or have hundreds of games sitting in their library unplayed talking about game prices or value per dollar. Y'all suck at this. You better leave this discussion alone.
I think you somehow accidentally sent the same comment twice. The link to the comment where all the replies are is https://piefed.social/comment/12075820
I can't see that comment. I can see it on my profile, but when I click on it, I can't see anything, and I don't see the comments people left on it/can't reply to them.
Really odd design from Lemmy/Piefed, or maybe a bug, not sure.
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(35 replies)
Easy fix: have a two-hour intro video that you can't skip ;-)
Kojima: "what's so special about that?"
"Only two hours? Oh man ive wasted so much effort..."
yah that deff won't make the review bombing worse...
This is going to translate into "more sells" same as drm.
People who want to pay will pay. People who doesn't want to pay won't ever pay. With digital media there's objectively any loss if someone who didn't pay played your game. So just let it be, you are not going to sell more just because you removed or made smaller the steam refund window.
"More sells" is a giant leap past "make your game longer tham 2 hours".
Especially when there's no real proof out there that this game is getting refunded significantly more.
Remember, some people love to just complain, especially if it suggests that the people that don't like them are evil
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