News

Indie Developers Report Steam Refund Abuse From PC Gamers, Show Graphs To Back Their Claims

June 7, 2015 John Papadopoulos 372 Comments

It appears that Steam’s new refund policy will hurt indie developers more than they initially thought. Today, Qwiboo and Puppygames shared some graphs, showing declined sales due to Steam’s new policy. It’s still too early to speak, but from the looks of it, Steam’s new refund policy allows gamers to play and test a lot of games for free.

On one hand, that’s not a bad thing. In the past, we’ve been getting a lot of demos. Nowadays, game demos can be really counted on the fingers of one hand. Okay okay, that’s an exaggeration but you get the point. Thanks to Steam’s new refund policy, players can test and see whether a game is worth their time.

On the other hand, this new policy will hurt indie developers. You see, some gamers are really greedy and will take advantage of this new policy. What was that? Your game costs as much as a beer? No matter. And that’s the sad thing about this whole thing.

Take for example Qwiboo. This indie dev released on Steam Beyond Gravity; a procedurally generated “platformer” where you jump in-between planets and try to collect as many pickups as you can. The game is priced at $1.99 and has been on Steam for almost nine months. During that time, the game has received a lot of positive reviews. And this is what happened when Valve announced Steam’s new refunds policy.

As Qwiboo tweeted, out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That has never happened before as Qwiboo noted.

It's refunds. Out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That's 72% of purchases. Rate of refunds before was minimal. #SteamRefunds

— Qwiboo (@qwiboo) June 6, 2015

Qwiboo agreed that refunds should be available, however this new 2-hour policy is currently being abused by a lot of gamers. And while this may not hurt triple-A titles that last 10-20 hours, it does hurt indie devs. Qwiboo also provided another graph, proving that Steam’s upcoming Summer Sale is not to be blamed for these low sales.

And Qwiboo is not the only indie developer that suffers from this exploitation. PuppyGames has also shared a similar graph for its Steam sales. As we can clearly see, sales took a dive after the announcement of Steam’s new refunds policy.

It remains to be seen whether Valve will react to this whole exploitation of Steam’s new refunds policy. In its current state, players can enjoy indie games for free.

Our opinion is that Steam’s refund ‘time-played’ policy should be dynamic. For indie titles that are priced at $2 or that last 2-3 hours, it should be around 20 minutes or so. For games priced at $30, it should be around one hour and for games at $59.99 it should be 2 hours. Or at least something like that.

The point is that in its current state, Steam’s new refunds ‘time-played’ policy can hurt indie devs.

Share on Tumblr

Kuru

“a procedurally generated “platformer” where you jump in-between planets and try to collect as many pickups as you can. ”

are….are you serious? This sounds like the kind of sh*t that should be on Neopets or something. No wonder people are returning it. Make something compelling with a f’ing story or something, some kind of hook. This is just recycled flash game sh**e.
Ebola-Chan????????? ???????

I don’t necessarily think that they should be free(although they shouldn’t be at AAA prices). I’ve played some good games that were less than 2 hours long. Some games I’ve bought with about an hour of gameplay were well worth the money I paid. I wouldn’t get a refund for Journey even if I beat it in that time. It was a good game and I’ll want to share it with other people in the future.

I would probably get a refund on a broken game or one of those cash grabs though.
Ebola-Chan????????? ???????

I really hope that Valve doesn’t allow exceptions. This is the first policy I’ve seen that might fix the cash-grab and asset flipping issues on Steam. Valve needs to keep this policy since it was almost impossible to get a refund before this.
dana

If I could, I would have requested refunds for all of my Puppy Games purchases, because they are impossible to play with a gamepad, even when I followed their ridiculous instructions on editing config files. They have been one of the most vocal whiners for a long time now, so I’m not shocked that they jumped in with poor-me abuse claims mere days into this new policy.

At the end of the day, if devs don’t like gamers wanting their money back, they should make better games that people want to keep.
??? ? ????

Or, maybe, people can ask for a refund after finding they been scammed. Work a little more, you lazy bums. Jesus, a dude complaining about steam policy damaging his profits of a cellphone game port where you tap a button to float. Thats NORMAL.
Convergence87

total biscuit does actual research on this unlike some sites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPUToCNq-iA
Sara Almeida

So, let me get this straight…. people buy games, complete them and then ask for a full-price refund (aka free game)? Is Steam trying to become a “legal” torrenting system or something? Torrents have been around for far longer than this new “policy”, and its what people use when they either want to test games before buying or just playing them for free… plus you don’t have to request your money back and wait for it to transfer back into your account.

People who use Steam for “free gaming” like this are obviously not aware of the alternative…
- Amir
  
  “turn Steam into a “legal” torrenting system”
  drama much ?
  
  “impossible for any videogame company, that uses Steam, to rely on it”
  yeah it would be impossible to screw costumers over and over and gets away with it.
  
  “better alternatives”
  origins doing it for few years now, retailers also doing it, only alternatives are uplay and publisher/developer’s own website.
  
  “allow consumers to cheat out them of their money”
  it’s a product, if someone didn’t like it then it’s his/her right to get a refund. plus if some devs dislike their consumers that much, why they are after their money this bad ?
  
  “years of experience”
  “stupid mistake”
  pick one.
  
  “hamper the refund policy with a few limitations and restrictions”
  i agree with that, specially on indie games, 2hours is a little bit too much for many of them. 15min to 20min is ok i guess and limite on amount of refunds per week or two weeks.
  
  on the other hand i bought Godus a year ago 20$. game is not working anymore after it’s last year’s update (3 weeks afte i bought it) and before that i just bought an idea which didn’t come true. a refund would be nice even if those devs won’t release their games anymore on PC then nothing of value was lost.
  - Sara Almeida
    
    Games like Godus are probably one of the few situations where, if I was Steam, I would make an exception for the customer. Developers really need to stop dumping their projects on Steam and abandoning them half-way through or break them so hard that it becomes unplayable.
    
    On the other hand, people that “invest on ideas” (I assume you’re talking about Kickstarters and Early Accesses) should not get a refund that easily. First, its your own goddamn fault for investing in an unfinished project, secondly, anyone who does it should know there’s risks associated with it.
    
    I do agree that Kickstarters and Early Access needs to be better monitored to avoid getting people cheated out of their money but still… the way it works now, you should know what you’re jumping into and need to deal with the fact you may not get your money’s worth. Call it a donation instead.
    
    Patreon is probably my favorite paying method for things like these – instead of donating a fixed, sometimes huge amount of money, you pay a small fee every month until the project is done or until the devs think its enough to cover one person. The downside is that you loose benefits for dropping the sub, no matter how much money you invested on it – which doesn’t work well for certain things.
    - Amir
      
      “its nobody’s fault but your own for investing in an unfinished product”
      yes but doesn’t mean i can’t get a refund specially when the game is broken, if it was bad but a finished/working product yeah.
      
      “really ballsy, rich or foolish to invest in them”
      :)) and i’m dead broke and living in middle east and even by middle east standars i’m still broke, lol.
      
      anyway, have a good life, hope they improve the refund policy for indies with some limitations etc…
mitcharts

This article just got rekt by TotalBiscuit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPUToCNq-iA
Linus Walters

this article is very misleading…as are the charts. thanks for trying to lie to us by using skewed math and statistics…you should work in politics and stop making this click-bait sh*t
Amir

20 minutes of playing the game, like it’s not two weeks after purchased and 2 hours after playing. if you don’t run the game it won’t use that timer.
John Hitman

Funny how you talk about being polite… when EA allows you to refunds game and the page explicitly says : If you don’t love it, just return it!
Marcos Venturelli

“It’s still too early to speak” …… but you’re going to do a whole article on it anyway, right? -_-
Dr Phil tells it like it is

I generally find indie games to be immensely boring and over-hyped to no end. Seems to me it’s just a bunch of pretentious snobs being all “it’s Indie, so it’s good” regardless of the content quality. So generally speaking, I find the reviews on such games to not be worth the electricity used to light it up on my screen, due to the bias of the genre. My experience with the better known titles so far has left me feeling as though it’s just a rip-off of a SNES game with “artsy” graphcis. The reviews, however, would have you think it’s original, innovative, dynamic and other such buzz words.

Maybe I’d be interested if they made a better game that people wouldn’t want to refund rather than sook and post screenshots crying woe is me about their current game everone seems to want to refund.
OvidiuGOA

which proves my point even more, they outsourced the game to Akella and released a sh*t game. They oversaw what Akella was doing, they let their ip in their hands and they were ok with trying to squeeze some more money from us fans by releasing that horrible horrible game. I have no more respect for rws and i have no respect for studios that live off games 10 years old or more while not releasing anything and still think they are relevant.
John Papadopoulos

This story went viral so I think a stickied comment should be included. Basically what happened here is: we got the data, we thought that Steam’s current refund policy can be exploited, we published a story to raise awareness. And that’s that. So instead of misinterpreting the story, here are some facts:

1) Steam’s refund policy currently can be exploited. Totalbiscuit agreed that in its first days some users may have abused it (16:10 mark of his video).

2) Steam’s refund policy needs to be refined. Fact. We all agree on this one.

3) “Steam’s new refund policy allows gamers to play and test a lot of games for free.” That’s also a fact. You can play for free 2 hours of each game and get a refund. Not a bad thing as there are no demos, except when a game lasts 2 hours (whatever game, it does not matter if it is from Qwiboo or PuppyGames).

4) “You see, some gamers are really greedy and will take advantage of this new policy.” Also a fact. There are some greedy gamers. We did not claim that ALL PC gamers are greedy, so don’t put words in our mouth. Like it or not, there are some bad apples. And bad apples can be found everywhere.

5) Did we really take anyone’s side here? Of course and we didn’t.

6) Our opinion is that the “time-played” rule is flawed. That has nothing to do with Qwiboo or PuppyGames. For indie games like Beyond Gravity or Supercharged Robot VULKAISER, you only need 10-20 minutes to realize whether this is a game you like or not.

7) Our opinion is NOT that Steam’s refund policy will doom indie devs. Or that it’s a bad thing. Or that it’s the worst thing ever. Or that it is not needed. Our opinion is that it is flawed, and everyone agrees on it. It needs to be refined. We raised awareness. Now if some misinterpreted this article, well… that’s not really our fault.
- Amir
  
  update the article john, no one will see it now specially if it’s on page 2.
  
  “play and test a lot of games for free”
  it’s not free, they pay for it and get a refund with 2 to 7 days until they get their money back, pirating is much a better option in this case.
  
  “There are some greedy gamers”
  there are more greedy devs and publishers and they abused everyone in the past decade.
  
  i agree with the rest. but as an independent pro customer website the article feeled a bit one sided and quick to judge specially with those graphs they shared which makes no sense.
Puppygames

http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1708
- Puppygames
  
  I wonder if that’ll clear anything up.
fizbanic

Indie games were taking advantage of players well before this came along, they would advertise their game no different then professional studio’s in order to get your money but only deliver partially on what said or it wasn’t as exciting as they made it out to be.

It is about time that players were able to check things out before committing to them. I have been a gamer since pong and there has been many game that I have wasted 60$+ on only to find out that it was not as great as it was made out to be.

Time for that is over now.
T K

Why buy and keep a game if you can buy it, play it, then return it and lose no money. Even if you dont finish the whole game its no big deal. But you can do it also incrementally and finish the whole game.

Just keep buying the same game over and over again over a period of several weeks/months and simply save the game’s user profile from your harddrive and continue where you left off the last time by pasting it to the new install directory.
- Amir
  
  you will get banned forever, it did happened to some people who think they can fool the system, it has flaws but it will monitor you and will finally get you and you loose all of your paid games
  - T K
    
    They’ll never know. Once you buy and download the game onto your harddrive, its yours forever. All you have to do copy all of the game files and folders, install it on a machine that has steam running but not connect to the internet, and simply play all those refunded games in offline mode.
    
    Steam will never know, nor will they ever be able to detect it.
    - Amir
      
      actually they will, steam is running in the background, maybe your stats won’t update but they will know (logs), lots of people gets banned for doing the same with totawar atilla. and why this much work ? they can pirate the game without risking too much anyway
smizzoker123

and i thought pirating was some big deal, this is a whole new beast huh.
FrankieFourFingers

Soooooo. The story is that indie developers put out a sub par game and can no longer screw over customers and are now CRYING about it. Nothing to see here folks, corporate cheerleaders who are on developer pay rolls, nothing to see here.
Puppygames

Just for the record, we never whined about refunds, and in fact we’re pretty chuffed with the low rate we’ve got compared to demo conversion. We’re 100% behind refunds and always have been. The graph we posted was a single picture; this article doesn’t actually mention the analysis we did of it whatsoever. It’s a really shoddy piece of sensationalist journalism painting a pair of developers as evil greedy whining sc*m that make sh*t games… that they’ve essentially just made up out of thin air. Way to go guys, like it’s not hard enough already.
- Vladimir Sveshnikov
  
  Care to expand on what you mean by demo conversion? Do I understand you correctly that people asked for refunds less compared to when they played a demo and decided to not make a purchase after that?
  
  Kinda makes sense since downloading a demo does not ask for a deposit of money so one would think it is a bigger commitment than trying a demo. However, how many people actually played the demo before making a purchase to begin with?
  - Puppygames
    
    Demo conversion is what we used to have in the old days before Steam. You released a demo, and of every 100 people who managed to actually install and play it (never mind find it and download it), you’d get approximately one sale if you were reasonably lucky. That was more or less the average industry wide accepted rate.
    
    So to my mind we’re well ahead of the game with 45% retention rate versus 1% conversion rate.
    - Vladimir Sveshnikov
      
      Thanks for explaining this to me. I don’t however agree that buying a game with a possibility of a refund and trying a demo are equivalent to allow you to compare the 45% retention rate with the 1% conversion rate as to compare sales. Especially since you mention old days where a demo might be featured within some gaming magazine cd and you would have to find a store that actually shelves it. 🙂
      
      Further more, you are the Dev behind the Driod Assualt, Titan Attack, Ultratron and Revenge of the Titans, correct? First of all, I like the art style of your games, looks cool. You know what I would love to play the demo of some of those games to see if I would like to pay money for the real deal. Why do they not have demos?
      
      Furthermore why do we even speak of demos of something that is ‘the old days’ or ‘before Steam’ because steam boasts 78 pages of freely downloadable demos of games on it’s store. Which is not much compared to the total number of games it offers but still substantial.
      - Puppygames
        
        We used to have demos but the situation with Valve sort of scuppered that. Instead we mostly just sell them for a dollar instead.
        
        Back in “the old days” just about every game had a demo, until some bright spark noticed that games with demos sell less than games without demos. (We did another blog post about that one, too: The Demo Is Dead http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1389) (also part 2 http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1394)
Ivano Cheers

I say my humble opinion here as I reported it also on the related video of TotalBiscuit.
I’m the developer of Aero’s Quest and I can’t speak about numbers since
we published the game on Steam few days after the Refund system has
been introduced.

Let’s start by saying that it is correct to have a refund system in
games like in any other goods in commerce; let’s say also that I agree
that we can’t use numbers when the general figure is just too small to
make statistics.

That being said I think that the only focus now, and this is my personal
take, needs to be on the terms and conditions when the refund may or
may not apply, and I explain myself better: obviously the refund is
correct when a game is broken or when a game doesn’t deliver at all what
it promises to deliver.
Another story is when a gamer is super excited
to get one game and then he gets disappointed by playing it (as long as
the game is sound) … at this point, if in the correct range of time
defined by the terms and condition of the refund policy, the gamer can
ask the refund.

Now: I’m not saying is wrong, yet there might be better ways to face this
problem: if you are a reader and you get disappointed about a book you
don’t ask the publisher to be refunded, but nowadays with digital
distribution every book has a free sample that can be downloaded before
you buy the book.

My question is: why Steam doesn’t make mandatory for the developers a
downloadable demo of the game (perhaps a time limited version of the
game)? This way eventually the buyer knows better what he buys and
developers wouldn’t complain too much about refund systems but they
will focus more on making better games.

Thanks to everybody

ivano
- Vladimir Sveshnikov
  
  Steam is not your mom so it does not make such design and marketing decisions mandatory. Better question is why don’t developers include Demos more often on their store page?
  
  As a matter of fact I can remember playing demos for two games Torchlight 2 and XCOM:EU, after playing both I wasted no time and bought the game. Also I bought the game right there and then because I wanted to keep going and I would not wait weeks or months for a chance for the game going on sale and giving it a go.
  
  So why don’t devs make demos for their games available?
  - Ivano Cheers
    
    We are saying exactly the same thing. To be honest is not impossible that steam decides something like that, other platforms (Ouya for example) do it already and is something devs must include in the store page.
    
    What you say is exactly my point: if you like the demo you buy the game, if you don’t like the demo you don’t buy it and the issue of the refund becomes secondary.
    - Vladimir Sveshnikov
      
      Yeah but I was really hoping as a indie dev you could have answered my question: Why don’t devs make demos available themselves?
      
      If you don’t mind me asking- Why does Aero’s Quest not have a Demo available on steam? If you look there are 78 (!) pages of free demos available on steam, why not more?
      - Ivano Cheers
        
        Our demo has been free to be downloaded via greenlight and on our site since January. Till before release we had more than 2000 downloads of the demo.
        As you said so I noticed that by publishing the new splash page of our website the link to the demo is not there anymore, I will fix it asap.
        So we had the demo available and I’m a supporter of the demo for games and if the quality is there the demo will help with sales.
        
        I’m going to fix the splash page.
- Amir
  
  “mandatory demo”
  valve can’t screw with big guys (ubisoft/rockstar/activision/warner/etc…) but they (big guys) can screw with anyone else
  - Ivano Cheers
    
    Look that I stand exactly on your side, I’m an indie dev after all. I just gave my idea on what might be fair for gamers (platforms like ouya do it already).
    I know that big companies keep valve by the b***s, probably they should use rules for indie devs different than the ones for big names to guarantee the final quality.
    - Amir
      
      i know, i’m not disagreeing with you at all
Vladimir Sveshnikov

This is abhorrent ‘journalism’. You put up an article based on a tweet or two and a misrepresentative graph.

Regarding your sticky-

1) He said – she said. It’s a one man’s opinion and a just because a system can be exploited does not mean it is being exploited or that it is a bad system. This again is the ‘elitism’ and greed of Indie Devs. This is great news for customers and developers. It is bad for dishonest Indie Devs who try to put out a game and grab your cash knowing there is no money back. (A practice that is protected and upheld by the law outside the digital market)

2) “Steam’s refund policy needs to be refined. Fact. We all agree on this one.” We finally have a refund policy to begin with. I am quite happy and 2hours is not even that much of a time to really make up your mind if you like something or not. Again in the real world that time is usually like 2 weeks or a month or something on that scale. I as a gamer look for games that I can play for 20 hours and upwards. If it is any less than that I consider it a waste of my money. You want me to make up my mind for an indie game like £15 or less in like an hour or less? That is nonsense, it just shows that devs who protest are not ones who are being exploited but they are the ones who exploited us to begin with by selling us games that we did not like and did not want to keep.

3) Steam is making a statement here: If you produce garbage to distract people for less than an hour or two then we are better off without you. Steam sells a lot of AAA and high quality titles that people sink in 10s, 100s and 1000s of hours. If you start mixing in games that are worth only like 10min of play then it is just a lot of noise, that might be better off on Android and iOS. However, if you make legitimate games that capture the customer’s attention for many hours then it is a non issue to you and all you need to care about is putting up the quality.

4) But you make the greedy players up to be a problem. So you are either implying that a lot of us are greedy and dishonest and have no intention to pay for games that we see fit for play or you are just being sensationalist and again dishonest by making a non-issue of a few freeloaders, who are going to play a few games for 2 hours for free and then…. No, those people do not really exist- they are pirating games and have no intention to put down any money. Steam can always refuse to give a refund for some reason. So would you risk playing games for 2 hours and ask for a refund that is not guaranteed or would you just pirate it and play it as much as you like?

5) You took the Devs side by taking their word face value and not fact checking their claims. You talk about how terrible this refund system is and mention the lack of demos as being a good justification for refunds in one sentence and for the rest of the article you bash the refund system and people who use it.

6) “…you only need 10-20 minutes to realize whether this is a game you like or not.” I would really like to reserve the right to decide that myself. How about this ask the developers on their steam page to publish average time played for people who own the game more than two weeks. So when I buy a game I would know whether it is a throwaway or a long lasting experience. How would I know that I need to make up my mind for one game in 10-20min and another one 2hrs. Price tag alone is not sufficient I believe because some games can have a few hour blockbuster experience and priced at £50 and some indie game with poor graphics yet intriguing and re-playable mechanics can be played for 100s of hours. That’s pretty much my 3) Valve and Steam are telling you- if your game has shorter life span than 2hrs, we probably do not want it here much.

7) Are you kidding me? This sounds like someone 16 years old wrote it. First of all your Article is extremely dishonest and poorly written and it is hugely BIASED against the refund policy. I do not agree that it is flawed it seems mostly fair. Who are the people who say it is? Are those two developers or is it everyone? Because if it is the latter then you need to provide more than the opinion of two isolated people, with nothing to back their claims. you wrote a shitty article and now you are rightfully getting heat for it and you play it of as if you did not say any of those things while they are all still there right in front of us in the article. If your article spends 95% of it’s time saying how bad it is and 5% of how it isn’t that bad after all then you are saying it is bad. To make a post comment saying that you did not mean it changes nothing. It is very very much your fault and yours alone.
Stephanie Smith

Lol do you remember breaking into the shinra building in final fantasy vii and the endless stairs that just went up and up for like 4 solid minutes XD
- Ebola-Chan????????? ???????
  
  Yeah, I remember that. There’s even an elixir on the stairs.
TheNinjaneer

Kind of still think that there are way to many variable at play here for this to be meaningful. The sales numbers were low, saying that refunds were nominal before makes no sense because refunds weren’t a thing before, and the fact that there was a sale at the same time kind of makes their cry of abuse sound more like a wimper.
JellyPopTart

Well if some INDIE games were not just SH(you know what I want to type) or offered a Trial (bring back trials please) We would NOT refund games. The policy is simple “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” if you can finish a game in 2 hours then it is not worth any kind of money. I refunded Hatred after 20 mins of playing all the hype and it was just CRAP I got stuck on trees, fences, and bushes which I was not even close to. As for other people talking about game play footage well I am sorry Game play footage is NEVER like the games they NEVER put the crappy parts in the footage just like movie trailers you see an awesome trailer go to the movie and it is crap the trailer showed the only good stuff in the movie. *walks off soapbox LIKE A BOSS*
Curunir

Pro tip – if “a game lasts two hours”, maybe the devs should not be selling it but giving it away.
Jake

Many people here seems to think some indie-developers create games just to rip-off gamers, but I don’t really think that could ever be the case. After all they need in every case put hours after hours of work into coding the game in some dark box (like my programmer brother likes to put it), which isn’t as nice as laying in the sun on some beach drinking beers and margaritas.

Some times they just suck at their job and what you get is a crappy game, but it has still required hundreds of hours of work in that dark box. If you would have been on a day job in the Wallmart as cashier and been sucking at your job, you wouldn’t have cashed so many customers during that time and you probably would have made a lot of people angry for long queueing times and less money for your company, but yourself you would have still got paid the exact same amount than not sucking in your job, but developer that sells none (or loses their sales for refunds) gets no money at all but still has used hundred of workhours for it.

Thus my humble opinion is that if game costs less than 10$ and can thus be considered indie, 20-30 minutes test time should be enough, but over 10$ and it should stay at 2 hours. Frankly many times when I play steep learning-curve grand strategies and it takes me two days to just figure out if I like the game or not and I still think 2 hours return policy is warranted.

As for the Valve’s no return of unspent wallet money, I don’t agree at all. Buy a product and be forced to return it and you should be able to get back hard currency and not just a voucher to buy another “vacuum cleaner” from the same company.

PS. I too live in the strong consumer rights Europe and probably in one of the most consumer oriented ones, but I still try to see the both sides.
Anonymous

ppl tested the game didn’t like it so they refunded it…what’s the problem? “we lost sales”
well that’s your problem welcome to the real world….make better games or gtfo.
deez nuts

AHAHAHAH good… i hate indie games
Voulke

Here’s a thought: How about you make your games last longer than a couple hours? How about giving the consumer some value for his money?

DSOGaming

Indie Developers Report Steam Refund Abuse From PC Gamers, Show Graphs To Back Their Claims

The Dark Side Of Gaming