Easy fix: have a two-hour intro video that you can’t skip ;-)
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.
If you’re planning to refund a game. Just pirate it
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.
Is the dev naive or young or something? Here in the US, people abuse public utilities, free services, etc all the time. It’s just the way it is, it’s in our nature as humans after all, to get the most of everything and leave nothing in return.
It’s not in my nature. I’d bet it’s not in yours, either. We’re both human.
Disproven multiple times, though actually something of a real life memetic hazard as people who are taught the tragedy of the commons tend to then act as if it was real thus causing it to be real. Its basically a way for rich sociopaths to justify their own behaviour by convincing other people to act the same way.
You are projecting again.
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.
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 that 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.
But what if it sucked? You can easily rage-complete a bad game within the refund window.
Who keeps playing a game they don’t like? Why would you do that to yourself?
It’s only a 2 hour window. I think very reasonable that you might play a game for 90 minutes and then at the end say “wait, that’s it‽ That’s not worth $x!”
Imagine eating a meal for two hours and then when the bill comes say “that’s it?”
I get that you might expect more. I felt that way about Cyberpunk. I’d barely got going, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I still liked it.
And I dunno the fact that it’s indies doesn’t count for nothing in my books. I’d say go case by case, but generally I agree with the indie dev that it’s scummy and I don’t support it.
If the meal is bad, don’t finish it and then ask for a refund.
There’s nuance here. If it’s ‘bad’ as in like the meat is still raw, or there’s a lump of the chef’s hair wadded up in it, then yeah it’s refund time.
If it’s ‘bad’ as in they made it properly but you didn’t like it, just suck it up and don’t order it next time. It’s good to try new things, but you can’t expect all of them to be a banger. The number of people I’ve seen punish the restaurant for giving them exactly what they asked for is kinda bonkers.
rage-complete
This is the sociopathy.
Sociopathy is not typically linked with emotion, no.
rage-complete
This is the sociopathy.
This is the sociopathy.
If you try a new flavor of chips and hate them do you take them back to the store for a refund? If they were stale, sure. If the game was buggy as hell and didn’t run right I’d say submit for a refund.
A lot of products used to say “satisfaction guaranteed”. So you could literally return products you had consumed. I don’t know how many people did that though.
Most of those guarantees involve mailing your receipt and the proof of purchase to the company along with a letter explaining how you were not satisfied before they will get around to mailing you a check for the $4.73 in 8-12 weeks.
Some of them went over the top the try to ‘make it right’. Dude I went to highschool with did this shit almost like it was a hobby. He’d call the customer support line and complain about whatever bullshit he could come up with - gummy lump in his drink, hard flake in his bag of chips that 'might have been a fingernail!… they’d take his number and address, and that was usually the end of it.
Then occasionally a box would randomly show up at his front door with like 50 bottles of soda or candy bars or w/e, and a letter apologizing for the trouble lol.
Manipulative little shit. And that was when we were like 14 years old… dude’s probably running his own organized crime ring nowadays. xD
Yes, so Steam is better and more consumer friendly than them.
Depends how bad. But I wouldn’t complete it if it was bad enough to return
I swear to Glob, another one that compares this situation to eating food. We’ve had that in another thread already. You could compare it to watching a movie maybe, but how are you people always going for the food comparison?
It’s more active than just watching something, like you’ve constantly got to drive the experience forward and so decide whether to continue.
But yeah I’ve also walked out of movies and got a refund. I wouldn’t do it after the movie though
Lol “you people.” This whole comment section needs a cold shower.
Most stores around here don’t accept food refunds unless they’re unopened or completely covered in mold.
One time I returned a single coconut because the inside was completely moldy and the lady behind me accused me of drinking the water and returning the flesh… I was like lady I have a job i don’t even care about the 2 bucks. I just figured how else are they going to know that they got a bunch of bad coconuts if I don’t come leave a record. Im not trying to run a scam for moldy fruit water.
She actually said that makes sense and dropped it but I was shocked… like you really think someone laundering coconut water one fuzzy nut at a time?
The perfect crime…
I think you’re getting lost in the weeds here, friend
I’ll confess I did this once – with Duke Nukem Forever. My old best bud and I played the fuck out of Duke3D back in the day (including building our own levels) and 3DRealms cockteased everyone for well over a decade with their supposed ‘ultimate’ title. So when it finally released I HAD to play it. And of course there was no way it could live up to the hype. It was an inconsistent mess and I powered through it in under 2 hours. I guess I’m glad I played it but it wasn’t even remotely revolutionary… At beast or was like a collection of fan mods bundled into an ‘official’ title. Not at all worth the asking price. I have no desire to revisit any of it so overall I don’t feel like I ripped them off; if anything I feel like they disappointed me majorly as a fan.
I played it so others don’t have to. Yeah, that’s how I’ll spin it 😂
If it aucked and you experienced that whole piece of art you don’t get your money back. You don’t get your money back for a bad movie my guy.
Art gallery’s don’t give refunds and they ALL suck.
OPERA IS A REAL THING
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.
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?
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
I feel like only the really dodgy games would do that, it would be a very blatant exploitation of the system. Just have a section in the refund request that says “the game gave me the achievement erroneously” or something and then you can look into it if there’s enough reports. Yes Steam has to step in occasionally, but that’s inevitable unless you’re happy with one side or the other getting screwed.
Like would any real game by a publisher do this? It’d tank their reputation by a huge amount. A lot of gamers care a huge amount about achievements so to get the 100% achievement on boot would actually really annoy them too. I just don’t see it happening.
The only other solution I can think of is for developers to just never release a game that can be completed in under 2 hours. Which is just silly.
What if it was 10% of achievements or something then? Then it would be extremely obvious if someone got a bunch all at startup
I think we might just need to make steam employees actually work, I’m sorry, there’s no easy away around it.
They still get to massively profit off of the huge cuts their platform takes though, obviously
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.
If you play a game for 50+ hours, you liked it. You don’t spend that amount of time being undecided.
You’d be wrong. Though you could say I didn’t hate it at least. But I certainly hadn’t made up my mind yet.
I played the first game with a friend. Which is largely why I even finished it. It’s pretty overwhelming because you’re left to figure out a lot on your own. Second game I played on my own. After that is when I knew I liked it, or at least toward the end of that second game.
I can’t think of anything other than grand strategy games that I’ve been that indecisive over. Everything else has been within like 3 hours. Some barely even 20 minutes.
Nah, you liked it. You don’t keep going back to a game for 50 hours if you don’t like it. Most people don’t even put 50 hours into games they like.
Maybe have a new rule for shorter games, like if its reasonable to complete the game normally in under 5 hours then the 2 hour window should be 1 hour or even 30 minutes. Idk how games are submitted but it should be an option at that time on how long the game is or a question about if its over or under x hours long so they know how to treat the game for this policy.
Enough rules, enough automations, I say, just make steam actually hire some real customer service humans. What? They can’t afford it?
That’s where the abuse comes in, because how can you be sure a developer won’t make a short game and list it as 20hrs to complete?
A dev that is abusing the system is going to be delisted by Valve real quick, methinks.
I mean databases like howlongtobeat.com do exist. Steam could also come up with their own numbers by looking at the average playtime when players get the achievement for winning the game.
Issue with both is, the game needs to already have been released and beaten a few times.A developer can still game an achievement.
Oh I get you there.
I played The Witcher 3 for over a hundred hours and didn’t realize I didn’t like it until I went to have a threesome with Triss and Yennefer and instead got left with blue balls.
I would have returned that game right then and there if I could have.
keep in mind, its partially overblown because according to the acheivements, only 7% users have actually beat the game of the people who kept it. the people who refunded shouldnt be that different than the average.
most of the people refunding are more likely people who rage quit more than people who beat the game in 2 hours
not saying its not an. ass move to refund but the people who refunded arent statisically the people who beat it.
Apart from the people saying that’s exactly what they did, which is what this is about.
I have never refunded a game on Steam. But then, I usually wait to buy a game until it’s been out for a while and usually on sale.
Realistically need a better solution for refunds, especially for indie devs. 2 hours just isn’t enough time for shitty games to reveal themselves sometimes, but its also more time than some absolute gems take to beat.
People mentioned achievements, but thats unreliable as even I can spoof achievements on steam last I checked.
Valve can’t be expected to manage every refund request thoroughly, and devs can’t exactly be trusted to respect those requests if they were in charge of them being its literally losing money, but theres gotta be some way to reliably refund a customer without it being abused to harm an innocent dev.
how would spoofing acheivements acheive anything. as I mentioned, its about NOT getting an acheivement (that is, never completing it). Spoofing achievements(marking it complete) goes in the opposite direction and would make the authors claims more true.
Agreed, if the 2 hour timer was reduced, we’d just see a bunch of nasty developers take advantage of it with games that are front loaded and then nothing as we have in the past.
It sucks for honest people on both sides of the equation.
We do that with physical media all the time, dont we? If I finish a game and for some reason I’m able to get my money back, I’ll get my damn money back.
Maybe not all games should have the same refund policy.
Well, the dev is absolutely right. It’s really unfortunate for him that some trash subhuman scum abuses it in such a way, but overall I’d still argue that the refund policy benefits people more than it harms.
I think the only sensible solution for devs would be to make games that are longer than 2 hours. Add some additional content that drags the game across that line. You already got a working game - take another month, add some more content.
Bloating and padding a game unnecessarily is likely to increase the amount of refunds if anything.
I think locking refunds after a certain achievement unlock is a decent way to address this unless devs are scummy and do it after one achievement. Though proper disclosures can fix that too.
You’ve found the main menu!
unless devs are scummy and do it after one achievement
Well guess what will happen.
This is something which will never have a solution that makes both players and devs happy. Someone always gets shafted.
