this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 84 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (14 children)

The people who legitimately do this are the ones who make the rest of the gamers look bad.

If you bought a game, especially for $3, played it from start to finish over the course of an hour and a half, and then bragged about it when you refunded it. You fully deserve to have your refund capability disabled.

The thing is, though, I don't really know a way that this can be implemented without allowing publishers to game the system. I do personally think that Two Hours is a little generous for the overall story because I will generally know whether or not I'm going to like a game within 35 minutes of playing.

I think a good alternative to it is have your refund window be based off of the current sale price of the game.

So for a game that's less than five bucks, you would only have somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour of a refund window.

Then for your typical indie window, which would be like fifteen to thirty dollars, you have an hour to hour and a half then your AAA title pricing of ~60, you have two or three hours.

I can understand refunding a game if it's broken on your system or just trash, but it feels real sleazy to me to spend money on a game, play it to completion, and then refund it anyway.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 33 points 1 day ago (4 children)

It largely depends on the type of game. There's are plenty of games I've played where you're still in the tutorial after 2 hours. Hell, I don't think I knew if I liked EU4 until I was like 50+ hours in.

You don't need 2 hours to figure out if you like Super Meat Boy though. You'll know in less than an hour. Probably less than that.

For those who wonder how you could play a game for 50+ hours and not know if you like it; it's a grand strategy game with lots of functionally. A full game can easily be 50+ hours depending on how fast you let the game run, and your first game is definitely going to have a lot of pausing trying to figure out various functionality. First game is or two is just figuring out the basic gameplay.

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[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

This might sound dumb but why not have it so that if you get the achievement for beating the game you can't refund it?

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 19 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I suspect a big goal of this refund policy is to make steam self moderating. Valve don’t want to have to police individual games more than absolutely necessary.

If devs can game it by giving players the completion achievement the moment they launch the game, suddenly valve has to step in to solve the problem, and they are far too busy enjoying their enormous profits to actually do work

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[–] DevDave@piefed.social 17 points 1 day ago

Some gaming consumers are just easily directed cattle for rage stampedes about whatever. No time for comprehension, just get the pitch forks and go burn some shit down!

Similar theme but different story was that guy who distributes a VR "mod" for various games, including Cyberpunk 2077. The nuanced part is a big chunk of it is in proprietary libraries that are independent of the games it provides VR support for. Just look at what PrayDog had to do to get VR support for just Unreal games https://github.com/praydog/UEVR/tree/master and that other guy has made a toolset that works with multiple engines. Charging at most a one time patreon fee for an unlocked copy doesn't sound that greedy.

Another one was the more muted whining that Valheim's Iron Gate has cheated everyone by doing "the bare minimum" to be Early Access and are abandoning an unfinished game with Valheim's 1.0 release. Personally I think those people are fucking insane.

Forty years ago I was at a cross roads that would have led to me being a programmer in the gaming industry. Really glad I didn't choose that as the game industry culture is absolutely exhausting.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 5 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It's going to be a tiny minority of people doing that, but there probably ought to be a basic check to see if you got the achievement for completing the game before letting you refund it. Maybe not for YouTube rageslop like this, but for the smaller "experience" games, like Unpacking or something.

Realistically a lot of people are treating the refund system as a demo. I know on PS+ there's the option on a lot of games to play it for two hours before having to buy it. I guess the PC is a bit too open to allow for that. Could offer that by playing it in the nebulous "cloud" I suppose.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 3 points 20 hours ago

It really is a tiny minority. A handful of reviews said they did it specifically for that. That's it.

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Honestly that game looks pretty fun, especially as a two player game. Just keep it after you beat it and play it with someone else. Or play it again at varying levels of inebriation.

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