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.
https://twitter.com/qwiboo/status/607273552060948480
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 $59.99 it should be 2 hours. Or at least something like that.
The point is that in its current state, Steam’s new refunds ‘time-played’ policy can hurt indie devs.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I don’t understand one thing…
how can he speak about rate of refunds before refunds were allowed?
Steam always had refunds,it was just really hard to get one.Basically Steam support used to only allow 1 refund and that’s it.And no one would waste that refund on a 2$ game.
so…when getting refunds were really hard, there were fewer refunds? who would have thought that?
Well, demos are really rare nowadays. So this 2-hour refund thing could be a good thing.
What I think these refunds show is that people do a lot of impulse buying (I know I do). Before the easy refunding, people just “took their loss” and moved on. Now they press the refund button.
It would be interesting to compare these refunds charts to a chart showing something like a buyers / actual players ratio. It could be these refunds are not only people gaming the system … but just customers returning their game.
i support this time-played policy 100 % ,since now we gamer know quality of the games that we buy and didnt regretted at all with the money i throw. Usually i get tricked by hyped and fake positive review and throw money on bad quality games.
you are talking about tripple A games. But there are too many indie games created by one, or two people that lasts just two, or three hours and can be super good.
They can try and make them longer, meatier, more varied or harder. Whatever best suits their type of game. Super meat boy is an indie platformer, but good luck beating it in 2 hours on your first playthrough. I understand, that there are short games that cost only a couple of bucks. But if a game can be beaten 100% in 2 hours I tend to feel ripped of, no matter how good this game is. Just because it was so short.
On the other hand time based refunds might force developers to add filler just to pad their games. That’s bad of course.
Still I see refunds as a good thing. And 2 hours time limit is just enough to judge some games.
I have never played a 1-2 hour game that I would pay money for without being exposed to some misleading adveritsing.
Also 75% isn’t normal, I sold downloadable e-books with maybe 10-25% refund rate although people could download my book and then get full refund.. People are probably just trying out new feature and the amount of refunds this first week isn’t representative of how it will be in the future.
I don’t think it’s abusers, but comparing to illegal non-refund policy to a newly introduced refund policy is just stupid. Also, this game is super old and was being sold like once daily, no real data to analyze. Better to analyze data of a newly released short title.
Maybe they didn’t liked the game and that’s why they refund? Maybe indies abuse steam before not having refund?
I think you’re on to something there. A high amount of refunds once they become available is more likely to mean that PC gamers don’t want to own lo-fi mobile games than that they are abusing the feature.
The issue is: the game in question is at 89% positive reviews. Doesn’t seem like customers have been tricked into buying a bad product.
The store page even contains a video with *actual* gameplay footage – a rarity nowadays.
This really just sounds like people playing the game and then refunding it because they can safe money that way.
True, I mean they ARE buying a casual game, which means they’re basically just looking to waste some time. It’s kind of a mini-game in itself just to play a casual game and refund it real quick!
If you’re that* kind of casual gamer, you’ll likely still spend that money on a game some time in the future, so Steam still gets its money, and the devs most affected by this will be the ones with crappy games that don’t meet a standard of quality.
Either that will force devs to increase the quality of their game (yey, consumers win!) or it will simply discourage them and drive them out of the market (which may still be a win for consumers if it cleans up all the clutter…)
Then again, Beyond Gravity doesn’t seem like Steam clutter. It seems well made. I’ve skimmed through some gameplay vids and reviews on Youtube and all of them were positive. The 89% positive reviews on Steam support that.
It’s only fault seems to be that its aimed at the more casual player and that ~2 hours are enough to get through most of the content. But how much playtime do you expect from a 2€ game?
All signs point to people just being cheap and refunding it solely to get their money back.
There is nothing wrong with deciding a product is not worth your money and returning it. It is up to the seller to provide value, not the consumer.
but not after using the product, experiencing 90% of content?
Its like you buy a ticket for cinema, gointo the movie and then leave 20 minute before ending and demand a refund..
the cimema would laugh at you..
so,dunno, maybe there should be a rukle, like -only when <10% of content was acessed/watched- so it works like a real demo.
When people like it, they forfeit their right to refund, if not they get a refund, but only if they saw less than 10% of the game (be it timewise or whatevs)
Imagine this, I buy a tool to fix some plumbery at my house, I use it just for some reparation I need, then despite the fact the tool was pretty useful for me I just return it, is that fair for the tool manufacturer? People isnt returning something they dont like, just using it until the use time set to one hour and 59 minutes to get some free games asking for refund. I guess most of them are just copying the game folder to use it later without DRM.
There are people who are being honest, they dont like, they return it, but most are just looking for free games.
whatever you buy online can be given back for a refund in 30 days. You can, if you want, use everything for 3 weeks and then return it. Whatever it is. If it’s a tool that you use for 3 weeks and did it’s job you can return it no questions asked. It’s easier with electronics. I got myself a dozen kind of drones and every console out there to try at home. I kept whatever console i liked, returned the other, i returned all drones and other stuff. You can do it and try every electronic device out there for example if you have the money to buy it upfront.
You will be receiving a comment saying that 89% are just idiots, trolls and else, because indie haters can’t stand that there’s people who like X indie game.
But it’s their money. Developers aren’t entitled to someone’s money. They need to make a product that people want to keep.
And the customers aren’t entitled to just play a game.
What I’m suggesting here is that maybe – just maybe – there are people out there who don’t use the refund system to get their money back when they weren’t satisfied with the product. But that they use the system to simply play it for free.
You don’t seem to have made a distinction between casual and bad games. The article addresses that good indie games are being exploited because they are short (casual). There is nothing wrong with a short indie game that is also good. Priced at $2, the length of time is hardly a factor here. The problem is short indie games are not viable on this store front anymore. That is a problem. Your predilections have no bearing on what is being statistically presented here. A game that has garnered many positive reviews is being exploited, and will likely not be viable for production. That is bad. Lack of choice is bad.
People don’t want a 2 hour game. Lack of choice is when people are NOT allowed to ask for a refund. Now developers know to make their game longer than 2 hours. Game developers need to follow market trends just like every other market – they’ve been insulated too long so now they can get away with making minimal content for a quick buck. Hopefully those days are over now.
But that isn’t a trend see. It’s a loophole. The reason refunds exist and is allowed for physical goods is because there is incentive to keep it, i.e travel cost savings, time, etc. There is no such barrier for steam. It’s a simple several clicks and your money is back. Utility for nothing. Great for consumers. BAD for producers. But see, what if people want short games for low cost? TOO BAD. They are no longer viable. Less choice. Your example of lack of choice equating to no refund is not valid – it’s not even the same example of apples to apples. The refund mechanism is a regulatory variable that attenuates market behaviour. Regulation is required, but not infallible, especially when said regulation opens up an arbitrage profit (in terms of utility) such as this.
What? Your incentive to keep it or return is based on whether you think that product is worthy of your money. This is the basis for all competition! “Great for consumers, BAD for producers” is EXACTLY what we want! This is what a free market is all about – this will FORCE producers to compete with other producers for your hard-earned money. The consumers should be the ones winning, because when the consumers win they force the market to produce better products.
And that is exactly what Steam is doing. It’s smart and it’s right and I hope it’s here to stay. If your two-hour game can’t compete then GTFO.
Its funny when it comes to quality standart, some AAA games are just plain sh ! t but they still sell like pancakes, because buyer denial, people play them for hours, days or months before realize the game will be not patched or optimized.
This isn’t a Solution.. it is a problem. I am just saying.. It isn’t that cut and dry.. The reason these “Indies” are being pointed out.. is because they are considered WORTH IT BY 90% of the people who have purchased it over the last 9 months.. and now all of the sudden, nope… bam.. lots of refunds.. Common now.. Be reasonable.. This isn’t a crappy developer releasing a crappy game, that deserves to be refunded.. It is crappy gamers, cheating the system so they can play “more vidyo gaymes” (I know I misspelled it.. that’s how I assume they think when people act like this.. thinking they are “getting up on someone” when in reality.. its petty stuff like this.. that ruins the point of the refund policy in the first place)
WORTH PLAYING and WORTH KEEPING are two different metrics now. Worth Playing was the old metric.
Umm, you don’t seem to understand how the steam reviews work. They aren’t worth it to 90% of the people who bought the game. They are worth it to 90% of the people who reviewed the game. Big difference. If 100 people bought the game, and only 10 of them liked it, that means it’s only a 10% quality game. Yet if of those 10 people who liked it, 9 review it good, then magically it’s a 90% positive reviewed game. Hence why lots of games on steam have fake reviews from the developers. Lots of level 1 private accounts.
I never bother writing a review about a bad game. With means considering my library 90% are bad games following your logic.
Newsflash: not everyone is like you
I love how you jump to conclusions and put words in my mouth. I’ve never said anything like that.
“I don’t write reviews for bad games.
I don’t write reviews for 90% of my steam library
Thus, 90% of my steam library is bad games.” That reasoning is fallacious.
You think the people who go to the store page to write a review of the game are doing it to write a negative one?
If a game is a waste of my time, I’m not going to spend another 5 to 10 minutes writing about it.
We need to bring back the flash game community. Small doodly games shouldn’t be up for purchase on steam, they should be on kongregate or armor games. A game might be worth a click and 10 minutes, but not a purchase. Then the developer will need to release the game on an appropriate medium.
Your general bad or unfinished games has a lot more negative reviews. I’m not saying this is definite proof that people trick the system but it’s a sign pointing towards it.
It’s arguable whether games like that one ought to be on Steam but that’s besides the point.
I think people that dislike a game are way more inclined to write a negative review then people who actually enjoyed it to write a positive review. So your first point is kind of wrong. People who hate a game are annoyed so they go give it a bad review. People who enjoy a game just enjoy it and don’t really think about the developer and just enjoy the game.
Actually IMO you are right, most gamers love to write negative reviews when they consider the game is bad. And when the they liked the game, most of the time, they just play it and just uninstall it.
You’d think so, but if that was the case i believe more people would write reviews, consider how many people who uses steam and how some of their highest selling games dont have that many reviews on either side comparing to the amount of people buying, i would say your wrong,
Not really usually the negativity is proportional to the initial expectation, if someone pays 25+ dollars for a game and it turns out to be not that great you can expect them to write a scathing review but for 1-5$ games most people just forget about them unless they’re ridiculously bad e.g. Bad Rats or something
I don’t write bad reviews if a game is sh**e. I write good ones if its good though.
i think it depends on how much you payed for it, what the emotional or financial investment was when you bought it or if it frustrates you enough by being a really bad game. For a game that is not really very bad but not really good that you payed 1-2 bucks on and it did not frustrate you very much, you are not going to waste minutes writing a review on.
Not so. I’ve only ever written positive reviews. Bad games I just want to uninstall and forget about.
Well you are against the norm. Most people just want to hate.
Yeah those were the days and those flash games are actually even better quality then allot if the crap we see on Indie steam
actually people are more likely to complain than to praise
The new refund policy is going to skew things much more positively, since the buyers who found it negative are going to refund, and therefore not leave a negative review.
Ideally needs to be tested to see what the average playtime was for those that refunded it, if it was play until say 10 minutes from 2 hours they might have been cheating the game a bit… If only like an hour or so, they just didn’t care to play the game any longer.
I’ve had a reasonable number of games that I just haven’t cared to play past an hour frankly.
steam reviews aren’t really a good indication of quality; too easy to manipulate
how can be manipulated?
The reviews found most helpful by others are overwhelmingly negative.
Buy a game at Bestbuy, or a Console even and if you don’t like it you can return it in like, what? 30 days? Full money back. Customers sometimes buy things they don’t like and enjoy refunds, so, a bunch of indie devs abuse the digital market thinking “OH, well we know refunds don’t exist since it physically does not exist, so that means no trading or losses when a person buys the game, finds out it’s crap and they don’t want it”….. Oh, Steam refunds?! Oh no~!
If someone loves your game, thinks you put a lot of work into it and it’s their cup of tea, am sure Majority will not ask for a refund. I’d think the ‘Abuse’ will be of a minority of people and cheapskates. If anything, I’d think the ‘refund’ should come with a short optional questionnaire that asks what your reasons for the refund is. So we may get the honest truth from the consumers mouth of “Game didn’t live up to expectations / Game was bad / Game has tons of bugs / Not worth the money” and so-on.
Steam Refunds works in the consumers favour before it works in the Dev-scamming variety and the devs who don’t work hard enough for the consumers money. It’s a competitive market and this will ensure Quality control in an indirect manner. Consumers have the power, and if you do not appease the market, you’re not doing your job probably ideally in the right way or you’re screwing your market over somehow. With that said, yes, there will be an Elitist or Extremist sort that will abuse it or think themselves above everyone else and be toxic towards devs, but that’s bound to happen when you grant a person such freedoms.
Bestbuy allows the return of UNOPENED software and media, and in the event it’s opened, only an exchange of the same item is permitted. Furthermore, the return policy for bestbuy outright forbids the return of books/magazines. Why would they do this? Because you are paying to view to content, regardless of quality.
I think that ‘refunding’ in the games industry is dumb. People have reviews, ‘lets plays’, plenty of user commentary and can do their own research on the game before buying it. If you are blindly buying crappy games, you deserve to be stuck with them or perhaps Steam shouldn’t let them get published in the first place.
The idea that you can enjoy someones blood, sweat, and tears and then promptly refund it is stupid. Maybe demo’s need to come back instead?
Steam changed its refund policy most likely because of EU, and in EU we really don’t care about best buy or your wallmart 🙂
But yes, even in the US (the country that is being abused and owned by companies) has some consumer rights. Before this, Steam had none.. I couldn’t even get refund for steam wallet funds I didn’t use..
Had nothing to do with EU
No offense but why should you get a refund for steam wallet funds you didn’t use. I don’t think you should at all.
Because Valve isn’t dumb, any buck in your Steam Wallet is bound to Steam. They actually make sure it stays on Steam instead of you going to Mc Donalds, buy roses for your girlfriend or whatever. Devs get their cut removed completely and have a lost sale, while Valve definitely gets it’s cut for refunding you because they bind the refunded money to your Steam Wallet and you can’t spend it somewhere else. You have to spend it in Steam. That’s a win-win thing for Valve, the devs only lose.
You have to see it that way, whatever you buy on Steam, Valve will never lose the money you already brought into the system, once you bought a game, Valve is making profit from it, one way or the other, refunding you or not refunding you, the money is already in Valve’s system and stays there forever. I wonder how long it took for Valve to realize that, why they haven’t refunded for so long, maybe because they knew about the possibilities of abuse and the devs and publishers trust was more important to them, now the money is. 😀
My comment had nothing to do with the whole refund discussions. I just don’t think you shouldn’t ever get a refund for wallet funds. That is how every store/company I know that does it is like. And i agree with them.
You are only partially right there. It is more probably because this way it negates atleast some abusing potential.
Fact is that if they refund, the player is using those funds to buy the next game they would probably buy anyways and thus put less money into the system and Valve still needs to give the next game developer his cut, which in major titles probably is more than with the indie developers.
Naturally they will get all of the unspent funds for themselves and in the long run with large user base it will be a sizable sum, but it still can’t be their marketing strategy or they won’t make as much income as they could and would eventually be replaced by a more competitive corporation.
You realize you agreed with my post right lol?
If you think 90% of the refunds aren’t for games people have played for less than an hour you’re really lying to yourself and everyone here.
I don’t know how your comment relates to mine. Replying to wrong person?
I’m sure the refunds are coming from gamers who buy a game, play it till the novelty wears off (1-2 hours) and then refund it. Seems pretty petty of people to return a $2 dollar game.
It’s not petty if it’s a habit. That adds up to a lot of money saved.
Implying everyone in the industry actually puts their blood, sweat and tears in video games? – is one of my points. We as hardcore gamers CAN do our research because we’re experienced with this, so what about the Not-so-hardcore? The newcomers? The younger audience who’re gullible and naive? The casual players who don’t have the time to do the research because they work a lot? Sure, it may not be an excuse varying on who you ask – but this Protect those not-so-aware type of people. Us ‘HARDCORE’ demographic who’re aware, skeptical and try our best not to be fooled, are not perfect in our assessment of games even still, and we as a group are a minority in the industry even if we can fuel a tipping point in social trends on what popular games are ones the casual-crowd should dive into to a degree.
Look at DayZ for instance then, sure, there’s reviews, there were expectations, there was Let’s Plays – but it’s still incomplete, likely never will be complete, of all the people who bought that game and are unhappy and haven’t played it but did because of the hype? Because they thought the dev would be trustworthy? No refunds for them. A lot of new, indie devs, exploit the digital industry as-is, ESPECIALLY on Mobile, and especially under the guise of F2P w/ Microtransactions. Being careful is the smart thing to do, but we’re still bound to make mistakes, and when that happens? We now have refunds to help protect our investments.
There are some differences:
1. Best Buy is more selective in what to publish and what not to publish. Most of the products of Best Buy are from big companies that have their own technical support or warranty.
In Steam is too easy to get a game published, even templates from the Unity Asset Store can be greenlit and the sellers always can ignore their customers and even it’s possible that low sells of an indie game can kill its company making impossible for the developers to have time to give proper support to the game.
2.For PC gaming a very common concern is that is not always clear if a game will run in a particular PC or not.
Yes, there are “minimum requirements”, but it’s not precise enough. There are still odd hardware pieces that surpasses the minimum requirements but still doesn’t work, and also, is not always easy to know if a PC surpasses the minimum requirements.
And for the other things:
People doesn’t always has the opportunity to see if a game is shitty or not, maybe there are not enough reviews and maybe there are no let’s play on the internet, or maybe the only let’s play was made by a friend of the developer.
“perhaps Steam shouldn’t let them get published in the first place”, that’s the point, Steam doesn’t want to be a curator or their own store.
Demos are a good thing, but for developers demos needs more work, they need to be maintained and carefully crafted. Some developers even recommend to not release demo because a demo can reduce the game sales in a half.
I agree that enjoy a game and then ask for a refund is wrong, but for a system like Steam, this thing was needed.
I hope Valve will do something to prevent the abuses. For now, I think that unfortunately, we will stop seeing short games on Steam.
NOTE: when I say “shitty games” I’m not talking about games that I don’t like, but instead games that are completely scams saying lies in their store page, crashing too often in most of the systems, etc.
some people get games that work fine on someone else’s computer but wont work on theirs, even though they meet the specs. people dont want to replace their operating system to play a game, they just wanna play it and if it doesnt work, they should be entitled to a refund, not because the game was crap, but because it didn’t work.
If you meet the minimum requirements and still can’t play a game, your issue is with the publisher/developer, not the 3rd party retailer. In the day and age of piracy, the retailer has stated policies you can choose to abide by or buy your game from a different source. If you don’t agree with no returns on opened media, buy digital.
Your problem seems fairly uncommon and situation specific so I don’t think it makes sense for a company return policy to accommodate such a rare situation. You may think it’s a common with ‘some people’ but when compared to the number of people shopping daily at a store like that, it’s almost immeasurable.
Dude, nobody bleeds, sweats, or cries developing games. Cut the drama.
We are talking about games that have pretty positive reviews and still receiving a high amount of refund, its obvious theres people abusing of the new refund policy.
Its clear you didnt get what the article is about, but still got 65 upvotes… internet.
In what way is someone requesting a refund “abuse”?? You think that 18 people bought the game, 13 of them played as much as they wanted for just under 2 hours, and then requested refunds? Not likely. Steam allowed us to submit refunds for games up to a year prior on the first day of the program (was quickly reduced to 6 months). Those 13 refunds could have been and likely were from purchases spread out over the past 12 months. NOT 13 out of 18 in just a few days. It’s like these whiny devs don’t even use their brains.
For the record, ” I didn’t like the game” shouldn’t even be supposed to be a proper reason to ask a refund, generally speaking.
Not for people with a mental maturity above a 14 years old.
A refund should be for a dysfunctional purchase or similar issues.
If I go to the restaurant and I don’t like the dinner, I don’t ask my money back. I pay, leave, and I will simply reconsider it at least twice before eating in the same place again.
I’d ask to not pay the bill just in case of blatant disservice (i.e. the food wasn’t cooked properly, I found something disgusting in my plate, etc).
It’s a good thing video games are NOT food, and that the law in France actually allows you to returns most products (unless specified) for any reasons you want. So yeah, requesting a refunds because you don’t like it is a proper reason. As long as you do it during the cooling-ff period.
Look:
This is the point this is you.
“The law allows” doesn’t mean it’s a polite, reasonable and non-exploitative thing to do.
And I don’t give a flying f’ that videogames are not food, it’s completely irrelevant. It would go the same with a movie or a book. If I choose to buy on and I didn’t like it, it doesn’t mean I should have my money back, it simply means that 1) I chose poorly 2) I’ll be wary to buy from the same author in the future.
Who’s fault is it that the entire game can be experienced in two hours?
If a dev doesn’t want people finishing their meal without paying’ then they should make that two hours the equivalent of a starter instead of the entire meal
No one is “at fault”, especially with a price tag of two bucks.
If you think you won’t like a two hours long game (I know I wouldn’t) you just don’t buy it. If you buy it, you do it knowing what yo uare getting.
How am I supposed to know it’s a two hour game? Unless a game is really long then they rarely mention the amount of gameplay you’re going to get out of it.
You realize that in like, literally every restaurant ever, if you don’t like the food, you can get management involved? And they’ll try to make it right? Sometimes by comping your food? You know, because they *do* want you to come back again. They don’t want you to silently leave.
That you’re OK with giving up your rights doesn’t mean everyone else should be.
May I ask how you would enforce your idea?
If Valve did this, then what is going to stop people from just claiming that any refund they want is due to “dysfunctional” issues? In simpler terms, if this is the criteria to getting a refund, users will just claim it. In even simpler terms, it’s not going to stop abuse.
Valve decided to go this route for whatever reason, and they aren’t going to pour loads of time or money into this issues. They’re going to look at the most efficient way to handle the refund issues. If they see you are constantly refunding and using their service as a rental site, then you are going to get cut off.
And for the most part this is how most retail works. I’ve refunded items at a store and sometimes the employee will need a reason, ANY reason. I once said I just didn’t like the color, because the system needed some reason. If you further look at retail, you’ll notice there are products that they do time limited window refunds, or one time only refund or refund for store credit only. These are reasons were done to combat abuse.
I don’t see how Valve is doing anything other then what is time tested, and will adjust accordingly if abused or hurting business. Meaning if these short games are a big part of their business and the lost sales is hurting the bottom line then they will change it.
And now devs are on notice this how Steam works and they can choose to adapt or find some other platform that confirms to the way they want to do business.
BTW GOG and Origin have refund policies. Desura I don’t believe has one but is now bankrupt.
Valve has given consumers the right to refund for any reason, so guess what that means. It means they can refund for any reason.
I wasn’t arguing if you are allowed to do it or not. I was implicitly saying you shouldn’t if you aren’t an idiot.
The game just came off a sale. They are comparing how well the game performed while on sale to how well it performed when it went back up to full price… They are being highly dishonest.
This dishonesty is more deserving of an article than that undersampled data those developers provided Steam. If the data is going to change Steam’s mind, Steam will change it themselves, since they are the ones who control that data, and it will certainly not be within a few weeks of the new policy.
Not only that, but the refund program JUST launched, and I immediately went through my library and requested refunds on games up to a year old (I wasn’t able to request for anything older than that, and a day or two later they lowered that cap to 6 months). I have received 5 of the 6 requests I sent out. So those devs will see refunds in the past few days, but the sales were months ago… So these devs whining about 18 sales, 13 refunds, as if that means only 5 people kept the game, are likely completely off-base. Most people didn’t bother requesting Steam refunds before, but now it’s easy, so those 13 refunds very likely are people who bought the game previously, and didn’t like it, but had no easy recourse. Now they do, and it’ll level out in due time. I hope the sites posting all this crap as news follow-up in a month or two’s time, to see how those charts are turning out.
If you say so to indie devs, you’ll be insulted.
This. Gamers are sick and tired of indie devs starting up an early access game and then dropping them once the money rolls in. Now, with refunds, indie devs have to actually finish their product, or not release a garbage one.
You could be on to something if I didn’t knew Puppygames. Those guys are brilliant and produce awesome neo-retro games. Their games are pretty much the only indie games I bought on steam!
I don’t want to see 1 hour indie games made in a day or 2 sold on the market for 1-5 bucks knowing that it’s free money for them whether or not the user enjoyed the experience. steam reviews help, but not if the developers are using their friends, family and paid reviews to game the system.
apple needs refund now
I think there’s a way, but I haven’t looked into it. They make that door easy-to-open one way, but difficult to go back out. Like a casino. I see the App Store as a gambling den, really; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose!
But no market is a gambling den. Or at least should not be.
It’s a gambling den in more than one way.
It only shows the truth.
Nobody really likes a million Indies in every market place.
We want triple a titles.
Well some indies are good but majority of them are cash grabs (like 98% of them). We need quality control on Steam but Valve won’t do it because it’ll affect their revenue. Instead they dodge criticism simply by stating that PC is open platform and they don’t want to restrict anyone.
On other hand 3 giants; Ubi, Acti and EA are abusing AAA market by releasing cash grabs. Now when someone says “AAA” most people think it will be yet another cash grab 5 hours long title with DLCs and tacked on multiplayer. What we need to do is be more smarter to force these developers to take risks and push the industry forward instead of playing it safe.
I blame Console community as well because they are the one who support COD, AC and Madden every year. On other hand you have kiddies at IGN (and other mainstream sites) that bashed Alien Isolation because it had long campaign. Casuals are ruining everything TBH.
Steam gamers shouldn’t support stuff like H1Z1 as well and sad thing is, that broken POS outsold Shadow Warrior… For me mid tier games are real AAA games. Those games have best of both worlds (higher production values and a lot of content) and they are targeted for core gamers and not movie fans.
There are some studios that still make AAA games that are worthy of full price like Blizzard and Relic Entertainment. Creative Assembly is also amazing but they need to get rid of those DLCs.
among Blizzard’s recent buy 2 play games i feel only Reaper of Souls worth full price to be honest. Hearth of the Swarm, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor, Diablo 3 itself, all felt lacking. sigh. also based on Legacy of the Void’s trailer at least story-wise i don’t expect much. hopefully i am wrong.
Creative Assembly did a rock solid job with Alien Isolation, they have a gold mine with Total War: Warhammer also.
Heart of the Swarm and Wings were worth the price TBH. 15+ hours campaign with high replay value Plus full fledged multiplayer, skirmishes, tutorials and map editor. They even rebuilt the entire UI for HOTS expansion. Legacy will be standalone game and price will be same as Hots. Sounds good to me.
Next step should be they should allow us to sell back some games from our library or allow us to convert our unwanted games into some kind of points or something which we can redeem to buy useful stuff from store.
Yeah, I’d like a retro-active refund on Dead Island and Alan Wake. Both horrible PC games.
Alan Wake is great what the hell you talking about.
Exactly what I thought but it’s his opinion so I respect it.
The game is pretty shallow gameplay wise. To many scripted sequences, not enough survival mechanics. Inventory reset every chapter is annoying. People that expected something similar to Resident evil would be dissappointed.
Why someone is going to expect Resident Evil from Alan Wake? It’s different from other horror games. He is a writer, trying to survive dark forces. I don’t think survival elements like eating roots refill your health or hiding rocket launcher in inventory is going to make the game better. Story was about light vs dark and entire gameplay mechanics are built around that.
Horror game? if only, the gameplay is pretty subpar, shine lighting until the dark shield goes away, click twice with the pistol.
MEH.
Most horror games play like that. You shoot enemies. Not only shooting mechanic (use light to break armor before shooting them) was built around its lore but rest of the gameplay as well, like using generators to turn on lights to protect yourself, using flares to avoid conflicts, use light bulbs to refill your health and quick save the game etc.
It was a nice concept… The game was far from perfect but no game is perfect. It had flaws but at the end of the day, it was great game but definitely not for everyone. The strong point of the game was its atmosphere and storytelling. It’s not scary as a horror game,,, it was never meant to be. It was more like Psychological Action Thriller with some survival horror elements.
You know what? I really liked evil within, because of the ammo managament the upgrade system and the difficult and challenging gameplay. Not scary or polished but definetly challenging and takes some thinking before you act.
while it looks and runs great the gameplay is repettive shallow and untinteresting, lot of which is filler with pathetic combat.
When does it start to get less incomprehensible? Sorry, if your game takes four hours (the length of my time played) before it starts to make sense then you’ve failed.
You wouldn’t accept that from a movie, why do you accept that from a game. Also, the controls and FOV were horrible. Maybe it was fine on a console but as a PC game it was garbage.
I played Alan Wake back when I had a 14″ CRT. Yep I lived on 1024×768 for 1999-2012. I spent 3 months with a 560ti on the display as well lol.
The point is, the FOV felt perfectly fine for that monitor, but today on my 22″ I’d definitely expect a betty FOV.
For controls, I can’t really complain because I always adjust. I even play games meant for a controller via mouse & keyboard. Controller I just can’t use anymore. Its like trying to learn to write at 25.
Tl:dr I wouldn’t really ask for a refund for Alan Wake because I’ve enjoyed it already. Even though I won’t enjoy it on my current setup, I don’t think I will play beyond an hour even if the FOV was patched.
“You wouldn’t accept that from a movie, why do you accept that from a game?”
I accepted Final Fantasy 13’s 20 hours of boring hallway running before it becomes alright. I still don’t have an answer to your question.
I made it about an hour into the cutscenes in FF13 on YouTube before I couldn’t take it any more. You are very patient 🙂
My guess is that I have Stockholm Syndrome with the FF franchise.
I like the series so much that I even put up with the shitty 20 hour hallways. It’s not like the next game is going to have tons of hallways… right? T_T
Have you ever heard of an opinion? Jesus Christ, people like you disgust me.
I didn’t like Alan Wake, to be honest. Too many monologues and having the main character spoil what’s going to happen next just made me give up on it.
Dead Island being horrible lol. Never heard that one.
If it makes you feel better I loved Dying Light 🙂
Yes, I second this
that cannot work, because these are digital goods, theres, for all practical terms, an infinite amount of them, if you were allowed to resell games, the value of these games would drop to the floor and the devs wouldnt get a dime
It would be neat if you could sell games to other users with a 10% cut to the devs and 5% to Valve.
Good. Now next time make longer and actual game instead of trying hard to be artsy fartsy.
“longer and actual game” …? What? So, just because a game is 1-2 hours long, it can’t be good? Could you be more entitled and elitest?
I echo his opinion a tad..not *elitist mind you, just not terribly interested in what are essentially mobile games. I find the vast majority of them boring. I would hope I’m entitled to that opinion…without someone trying to admonish me for it.
Why so many people shout the word “entitled” without knowing what it means nowadays?
Why did you think he used it incorrectly?
Demanding good customer service and basic customer rights is not being overly entitled. If anything, you’d be acting “entitled” to what any customer should be. You’re paying for a product/service after all.
Thank you! Finally someone gets it. People out there saying gamers are “entitled” or “elitist” when it comes to this issue are absolutely f’ing re**rded.
I am so sick and tired of these hipsters getting away with abusing customers merely on the thin rational that they are “indie”. If you make a game that is 1 – 2 hours long in length it is not worth a $20 price tag. I don’t even give Triple A companies that kind of leverage.
Well we’re not talking about customer service here are we? I thought Hystericalbanana felt like Umair Khan was being entitled in dictating what games should be in terms of type of game and length. And obviously it’s true that your paying for what you get, but he was implying most games in general. Which to me feels like entitlement.
Preferring longer games or a better time to price ratio still isn’t what entitlement means.
Entitled used as a pejorative means a ‘misplaced’ sense of deserving or privilege. If you think shorter games are worth less than longer games (or vice-versa), that’s just your preference.
Unrelated, but he also seems to have no idea what the word “elitist” means or how it should be spelled, for that matter.
Preferring or demanding? Preferring sure, but from the limited text that he wrote. He wasn’t saying he preferred to play longer kinds of games, he was directly telling devs what they were doing wasn’t wanted, and to do something according to what he wanted. And yeah, I honestly think elitist or pretentious is thrown around a bit too much without much though.
If they don’t like the refund policy on Steam then they can release their games on other platforms. I suggest using Desura or GOG.
I agree with you, though those two platforms are ironic, because GoG has a stronger refund policy than Steam and Desura filed for bankruptcy recently.
Your comment clearly shows how low standard of video games really is, these days. But then again long campaign is considered as of the Cons these days (IGN review of Alien: Iso)
Do people have different tastes in your made up little world there?
Most of those 1-2 hour games are walkign simulator or “Art pieces” barelly any gameplay.
Most games are repettive in order to be longer, you would thing those 1-2 hour games will be “quality” but are infact repettive as well, which means even less actual gameplay.
Puppy Games makes 2D strategy games and such that are slightly above flash quality. They’re not bad but most people aren’t going to like them. Not sure about the other dev, to be honest, but their Twitter says that they make IOS and Android games so I guess it’s a mobile port.
If I don’t let Triple A companies get away with this business practice, why the hell would you think I would let Indie’s? Just because they are “Indie”?
You may not be aware but a game called The Order 1886 came out for the PS4 not too long ago. It was on the market for full retail price of $60. The game was half cutscenes, half gameplay, and hardly any replay value for the span of 7 hours AT MOST! People were pissed off at this because they thought they were being taken advantaged of and ReadyAtDawn called gamers bullies, “entitled assholes”, and saying that gamers just don’t get it when it comes to “true art”.
I am sick and tired of game devs using the “art” card as an excuse to gimp a game’s performance, it’s length/replay value, and it’s actual purpose which is being a game.
If game devs want to make movies, they can go into cinema for that so they aren’t held back by making a control scheme. Hell this is coming from a guy who openly enjoys games like Ace Attorney which are nothing more than interactive novels. However the difference here is I am not being lied to when I play Ace Attorney. I was shown the gameplay, how the game functions, and what type of game it would be. The Order where I was shown gameplay and was not aware that half or more of the game was made up of cutscenes and those weren’t the only issues. So trust me, Indies are not the only ones who do this bullshit or try to get away with it.
I am not entitled when I ask for a good product for my hard earned money. Some of us in the real world have jobs and we don’t like wasting money on products that disappoint us. We want to feel invested in our purchases. This is basic economics 101. You don’t try to sell a house for half a million dollars and just tell your potential buyer to not mind the water damage, the holes in the ceiling, and the black mold growing in the kitchen and if the potential buyer speaks out about it that they are “entitled”.
“For indie titles that are priced at $2 should be around 20 minutes or
so. For games priced at $30 should be around one hour and for games at
$59.99 should be 2 hours. Or something like that.”
That still wouldn’t work. Devs would just shoehorn in a way to extend the first 20 minutes of the game with cutscenes or prolonged tutorial.
Refunds are simply bringing balance back to the Force. There’s been an explosion of crappy indie games all over Steam (and the App Store) because they know that they can cherry-pick and polish what is shown in the preview and once they have your money most people are not driven to go through the hassle of demanding a refund.
There’s an entire sub-industry that relies on this two-dollar-mistake apathy. I’m guilty of encouraging these developers because I’ve had lots of games that I bought and uninstalled almost immediately, never demanding a refund.
Of course, this has lead me to be highly selective now when buying a game – I bought maybe 3 App Store games last year. Years previous I had bought maybe dozens. Eventually most users will go through this phase as they get older and realize most games are just clones of other games, all competing for the exact same ‘casual’ time from you. How many ‘endless runners’ will you own? I was bored and done with that genre after three games and like an hour of play time between them.
Except highly rated games are being exploited. Not “crappy” ones. So your logic fails
What games for example? Steam says you can’t refund games that you played more than 2 hours. A game that you can finish in less than 120 minutes is a f’ing joke and should be free.
Their ratings system is a joke. Literally and figuratively. It’s either a yes or a no, plus how many one-liner reviews have you seen?
As your comments, I can say most of your comments in this site doesnt go beyond one or two lines.As your “logic” goes, most of your comments are crap then.
You can question my logic all you want, but I don’t see you countering it, which means you’re either stupid or scared or both.
LOL at clone argument, because AAA devs never copies things from other AAA games. What I see here is just an indie hater, but dont worry next COD and AC is coming.
I don’t see what your comment has to do with my statement, nor have I ever endorsed Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed. Look up what “straw-man argument” means.
There are actual clones on the market though. I can’t remember how many games on Steam or Greenlight are almost exact copies of Unturned.
Exactly. Most indie games I have on my library are crap I was too bored to ask for refunds.
Does microsoft and sony also has done this on theri consoles or not?
I know EA does it for their published games on Origin and offers 24 hours past the purchase (not played).
not on their digital stores but i guess you can refund retail copies but depends on the store again
indie devs just mad people dont want the crappy games they make. it someone derives all the enjoyment from a game in less than 2 hours, its not a very good game or is short and apparently has no replay value.
hey i was open minded i said “let those games exist” but instead of improving these “indie” devs keep releashing every piece of trash they got. Either broken, too short or just walking simulators with no gameplay at all.
Exactly the same thing happened to me… My point of view about these guys has changed in the last couple of months. There are more Cons than Pros.
there is a game called sylvio and you are basicly a ghost hunter.
Why cant they make something like that instead of the same 2DEEP4U walking simulators?
I’ll leave this here.
https://youtu.be/5svAoQ7D38k
Why people watch this bag of hot air, I’ll never know. I wonder what his Youtube demographic stats must show.
You’ll never know because you don’t watch. :v
As you’ve revealed yourself, so shall I.
Back on point, I’m going through Jim’s older vids at the moment, and am enjoying the subject matter he broaches on. That and he’s also English, so I get the humo(u)r even more so.
Yeah, people take his persona/humour waaaay to serious and focus on that instead of his takes on the subjects. Same with Yahtzee. English humour isn’t for everyone and of course their personalities can come up as annoying (you don’t have to like everyone) but when people starts to get of their ways just to offend people who happens to like, then things gets annoying.
People nowadays are just too damn silly.
I used to watch. He seems to act like a child trying to be “edgy”. All I think of when I’ve happened upon his clips is basically, “Man…get over yourself.”
Trying to be edgy? WTH are you on about? :v
He’s just presenting his opinions and criticisms in his well known manner/humour/persona.
I don’t watch Jim Sterling but I liked this video.
I stoped watching him at this dmc video.
It was basicly “now that dmc is old we can talk about it rationaly without getting angry”
So he said its stupid and completly riddiculus and utterly stupid and no one should take it sersiously and the fanboys were entitled.
Ok i said, then he got TRIGGERED at how the game potrays women.
I mean godamn son, you telling me the game is stupid and not to be taken seriously but you got angry over the way a OLD GAME potrays women, not the gameplay mind you but the way a old game potrays women.
At that point i stopped bothering.
To answer your question Jim is a fat clown with a whinny voice that makes useless reviews with stupid ratings…. mw3 9.0, bf3 7.0 to give you an idea.
His youtube gameplays are absolutly utterly stupid and worthless the only thing he has is bashing ubisoft and ea in his jimqusition videos but after a while they got old.
His demographic is pretty much weebos and special snowflake tumblrs and they give him over 10k on his patreon to make crappy videos.
the amount of people willing to try out games has also risen.
i am surprised valve hasn’t done something about the 2 hour policy for indies yet though.
Indies can be different. Maybe 2 hours is too much for “narrative driven experience” kind of game. On the other hand there are indie games that I played for hundreds of hours. And 2 hours are barely enough to get a picture of what they’re like. If they decide to change time limit for refunds it shouldn’t just be based on whether the game is indie or not.
i meant indies that are around 2 hours. i am sure developers can add a label or something to their game on steam page that indicates it is around 2 hours.
And how many would willingly admit that their pe… game is so short? More likely there should be a user tag for that. Other than that I would love to see game length in description to every game. But that would differ from person to person and hard to actually measure before release.
thanks to tag they have to admit thats the point. they can’t lie now thanks to refund. either they can tell it themselves, or get busted and have bad reputation. putting a monthly/yearly limit to refunds is an easier solution though
So far they don’t have to admit anything. They can keep silent about game lenght all they want. Especially if that might hurt their sales.
I have bought loads of games on impulse and recently (ark) started up, played/setup 10mins, refunded… just not worth it for optimisation alone
its just because its been made much simpler to refund that I have, otherwise I would take £20 on the chin.
im glad this is in place its been much needed!!
check this out!! play before you buy
https://www.gamesessions.com/en/Game/List
One other thing to consider is that more customer are willing to buy games on impulse now that the risk has diminished. It’s very likely that some of the refunded copies are gamers that wouldn’t have bought the game anyway because of the risk of losing money on a product they simply don’t like.
Good point. That’s why I think that proper solution is to have some sort of Quality Control.
I agree, I’ve heard several times that this new policy is good because it can be used as a quality control tool. I personally think that’s a very easy solution to a much more complex problem.
What some are suggesting is that the refund policy should be developed into a quality control service, but the point of the refund policy is to give Steam customers the protection they’ve lacked for so long; it’s a consumer protection service, not a quality control service. The problem with treating a refund policy like a quality control tool is that it shifts the burden and responsibility of quality control from the service even more to its customers.
The Steam marketplace is fundamentally flawed in this regard, refunds are (not purposefully) used as a band aid for an entire other problem that Valve should have dealt with a long time ago but haven’t (and probably never will, given their idiology). **The problem with this line of thinking that have caught on (refund as QC) is that exploitive developers are weeded out on the expense of smaller developers that have legit, good products.**
**This is debatable but it is how some developers feel, I think it’s important to include their point of view as well.
The data doesn’t support that assumption. What’s happening here is highly rated games that were already selling well have now flatlined. People are abusing the system
Data that is too small to support anything, two extremely small sources is not representative of the system. Note that I’m not denying that the system is being abused, it most likely is but it’s important to look at every variable at play here, I was merely pointing out one of the variables as to why people refund. Maybe they abuse the system, maybe they feel it’s less risky, maybe they just didn’t like the game. Statistic is not specific, it’s our duty as readers analyze, interpret and question the statistic based on variables we know, not just absorb it as a single undeniable truth.
Developers need to take into account 2 things:
1) People are testing to see if refunds actually work as advertised. To test this, they buy the cheapest game they can, instead of buying a 50 usd game and risk not being able to return it. This has undoubtedly resulted in the graph results for these 1.99 games.
2) Maybe their game isn’t that good. I haven’t heard of either of these games or companies.
Wrong. Sales were happening before the refund policy. On highly rated indie titles. Now they’ve flatlined because people can play 2 hours, play most of the game and then “LOL gimme money back”
We don’t know how long the people played those games before returning them.
First time customers have real availability to refund,developers complain that customers using this option (like with any other products!), especially in games they did not like.
There is refund policy supported by law covering almost any other industry but software, where refund means no real financial hurt for developers there is no law at all. Paradox or
great example of how powerful lobby can get.
Other industries got used to it, so software developers should too!
Or limit the number of refunds by time
One thing I think people are overlooking is that these games drop trading cards. People could be buying the game, farming cards, putting in for a refund, then turning around and selling the cards for 100% profit. Actually, I’m pretty sure this is happening. Valve needs to address the issue in some way, preferably by forcing cards to drop after the 2 hour refund window. Though their solution will probably be much less elegant, such as forcing all card drops to be untradeable for 30+ days or something equally inconvenient and annoying.
hang on a second. I need to go…somewhere, do to…something.
Pretty sure it will be fixed if this is the case.
You can just lock cards until game time is at 2 hour mark. Or make cards untradable until refund time expires.
Refund abuse? Looks like we create new words everyday, time to add this to the dictionary. What a drag.
you mean like triggering, toxic, problematic, harmfull opinion mansplaining and such?
Those hipster devs are well know.
I mean adding fuel to the fire that SJW’s will use in their next initiative once they come across this article and bring more disdain to the industry as usual. It’s not Valve’s problem if people want to refund a game if they don’t want it anymore, and that’s the point these devs are missing. They won’t remove the program just because one dev is outspoken about it. As much we’d like it to be it’s not a democracy so Valve will keep it in place you of all people should know that. You can’t force someone to keep a game if they don’t want it.
after shaming polish devs for being polish and making a game about their culture and not for amercia centric ideologies, after diagra basicly said that they killed gamers with a battle axe, i think sjws are not only mad, but they are insane, they will eventually ruin themselfs.
If it hurts the industry…well you gotta blame game journos who bought into this hipstery idea.
They will be the authors of their own destruction. They always find something to rant about somehow, even with the unexpected they will keep throwing things out there so they have something to talk about. I blame any corrupt journos and those who corroborated with them as the culprits for the propaganda they sell to the mainstream.
they dont want care, they want to whine. Game has all races, no asians? They whine about it. Assasin creed has no woman lead, they whine, liberation had, they dont care, not many POC, again liberation did but they dont care, then you got the “hur dur the new creed uses feminism as a marketing trick”
Ehh what isnt that what you wanted?
Lets not get into the mad max they proclaimed a “Femminst film” and how “MRAs boycott it” when neither of those 2 was true.
Freaking clickbaits use adblocks.
I know many years now that the media are full of crap and most people dont have any idead what is really going on around them, let alone what is going on outside their own country….YET THEY HAVE A FREAKING OPINION ABOUT IT!!!.
But the thing that pisses me off the most is that they are marxists, they have this “toxic” as they like to say ideology that derails everything into social unrest.
Think about it when was the last time we talked about games and not racism and sexism? It is also a one sided conversation, if you call them out on their bs they either block you and keep agreeing with eachother to build a echochamber bubble and blow it up on the world, or they will say “its not about the facts its about starting a discussion”
Sadly this is what this article is, there is not really a problem just some people screaming abuse and they get views.
They like to control to pretense of the ideology. It’s not about control of content, but of context, making their perception everyone else’s reality since nobody knows what to believe in the media anymore. You’ll never know if it’s the truth or a cover up no matter how honest some may be compared to others. Yeah every time a games out they never focus on its strengths anymore instead they keep targeting whatever is omitted, not seeing a game is good for what it is and instead dwelling on their subjective ideal of what a game should have not appreciating what went into the game in the first place from the devs. Yeah like I said, adding fuel to the fire.
Clickbait is the only way to get by now it seems. No one wants honesty anymore, they just want to print whatever gets people talking since more discussion is equal to more money these days. It doesn’t end especially when you count how many never disclose any relations that can affect the basis of the article or the position the author takes on the issue. It’s a mind game that began with the Internet that hasn’t ceased to this day. They have nothing to live for, so they screw everyone else who dies to add validation to whatever existence they have left. They may think their actions are human defiance but it is actually human entropy.
they are marxists and it is about “Starting a discussion” not facts. AKA rilling up “offended” mobs.
I knew for a long time now the media are full of crap.
Sadly there are alot of idiots, the most intelligent use adblocks
Starting a discussion that construes the facts. Didn’t know until my teenage years how bad media is. Makes you wonder whether you can believe anything anymore that’s put out there. Yeah mainstream is gullible which is they keep persisting since it’s a cycle that’s never ending for them. Someone has to break that cycle.
as a european i find american media extremely biased on left/right
That goes without saying especially since it’s endorsed by politicians.
Its just goes to show ya that pc gamers are a**holes and always will be.
i dont know who is the a**e here SOME pc gamers who bought a game no one knows about or a dev that made 2 hour game?
“Look! When Steam didn’t refund anything the games weren’t refunded as today!”. Really?
technically a 2 hour try is more or less a demo for them to try .
so if they didn’t like it , they have the right to ask for a refund !
i think that this refund system is a must, their are lots of bad games on steam , so this is encouraging for the consumer to buy the game with no worries , also it will straighten some developers and forcing to take their jobs more seriously .
Sounds just like when publishers started taking measures against the sale of used games. Being able to sell back used games is a good thing for us, consumers, but someone will obviously have to pay for it.
There’s also always the possibility that people are abusing the feature because it’s less than a week old. You can return any product you want in most stores, people don’t usually abuse it. But if you never had this option before and suddenly all stores started doing that, you’d immediately see a lot of returns. Maybe give it time?
Initial issues. Refund abusers will decline as Valve profiles them and starts refusing refunds.
Only long term risk will be disposable accounts used for refund abuse. Not sure how you could counter that without an overtly complex identifier logging system (PC specs crossed with IP crossed with payment method crossed with install software)
A $2 game refund is just petty & cheap though…..
IPs won’t work because most people have dynamic IP addresses. Mine changes about once a month. There’s really no reasonable way of preventing it.
With the amount of information you leak by having a web browser with cookies, it’s incredibly easy to identify someone. See:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
With the amount of info Steam can get on you, pinpointing someone becomes rather easy.
AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA MOBILE PORTS AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
Wait, I am confused.
Before Steam implemented refunds, there were no refunds. So after Steam finally applied to international laws, you now see a rise in refunds ?
Yeah, that’s what happening to games that are not really worth the money charged.
Qwiboo should consider:
1) his game was on sale, leading more people to buy his (several months old) game that (seemingly) wasn’t a type of game they’d enjoy.
2) his comparison to amount of refunds before the new policy is faulty, because before the new policy existed it was ridiculously hard to get a refund.
In short: the new Steam refunds aren’t quite so abused, as much as the old Steam refunds required you to sacrifice your firstborn.
This does not prove anything, Jim said it better than anyone else could:
http://ask.fm/Jimquisition/answer/128177519586
jim is a clown but long story short the developers claimed abuse, dso should have just included the data and not comment on it.
Yeah, I just finished reading the article and they did heavily weigh in on the scummy indie dev’s side. A bit more impartiality and objectiveness would’ve been nice here.
It’s not because 99% of indie games are sh*t, no. And that those indies outright lie about “innovations” and other buzzwords in descriptions, no
This is Polygon level of click-bait article, I love DSO but these sort of posts are not helping the site.
hoestly i am fine with bringing this to light and say “here is what the devs say”
But the part that they took a part in this was bad, they should just presented what the devs say.
If it was a clickbait, well it did work TB and jim sterling posted about it. DSO is greek so its not like they got something to lose.
Well, for now it works but, if this keeps happening they will get a bad rep and believe you me, it wont be good for them.
cant say it happened for gamingbolt or dualshockers.
i thought dso is big enough to sustain itself now, so no more dlc coverage, wtf happen to you guys at dso?
Nah, man. I disagree.
One man’s clickbait is another man’s controversial issue that needs to be addressed. I respect DSOG because all of their “clickbait” articles actually pertain directly to gaming, be it business choices, technical stuff or gameplay mechanics. It’s always actually about gaming. As long as they stick to that rule, they are good. Those sh*tstorms are on topic and actually fun to take part in and argue with.
It’s only bad when it’s about outside nonsense nobody wants to hear about and has nothing to do with gaming.
I think the article is relevant. Personally, at least I’m really interested in where this new Steam refund policy thing evolves to. And the title is pretty much indicative of what the article says, not missleading.
Now something like this http://imgur.com/VqG691H is actual shameless clickbait.
Good! F*ck ’em.
They should be hurting if their games are so bad people don’t want to keep them after trying them. This is good for the industry, good for capable developers and good for gamers. Go get your refund and spend it on some worthwhile game. I long for a return back to the days of the playable demo, and no, early access is not it. But this is, kinda. As close as we’re going to get anyway, so I’ll gladly take it.
Steam refunds are great and hopefully here to stay. No more hiding behind misleading bullshots and deceptive gameplay trailers.
Apparently Qwiboo is blocking anyone on Twitter who disagrees with them about Steam’s refund policy.
And Puppy Games? Puppy Games doesn’t give a flying fish about you:
http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574
Remember kids, statistics is the science that tells us the story of the man who drowned in a river with an average depth of three inches.
That’s the whiniest article I’ve read in a while, “you’re worth $1 because we sell $1 quality games”. Well, why not try and sell at least $10 or $20 quality games instead of regular appstore material? You’ll have more “worthy” customers then.
Oh man I remember that blog, I didn’t realize they were the same guys.
Karma is a b*tch haha.
i guess they could change 2hours to half an hour for indies and 0min for visual novels and put a limite on refunds in a week or a month. by the way i like it more the way it is now, that means i can buy another assassin’s creed, stress test it in 1 hour and then refund it so companies like ubisoft don’t think they can get away with their s***y ports. if there were Demos or benchmark tools we didn’t have this problems.
also i like second hand game trade between users at any time.
Exactly, it works against the big boys as well. Assassin’s Creed is a perfect example, where was the refund system last year?!
Yep. If the system was there when I bought Lords of the Fallen, I’d have returned the crap out of that bugfest.
yeah, if there was one i refunded watchdogs a year ago 😀
Ahh see, after installing the worsemod I played it until the end, and ended up enjoying it :/
This is why i stay away from “quick fix” games.
make better games
Don’t make a 2 hour game then.
22 hour game then?
Sure, but don’t expect people to care about your two hour high school art project.
mine? i will be doing visual novels mostly untapped potential in the united states
It’s quite clear that many indie developers would lose money on such a refund policy, but I think that is more due to how many horrid piles of deceptive indie garbage you can find through steam. I think if people feel they can return your game after two hours, that is your problem as a company for not creating a captivating game. It pushes the standard for first impressions a lot higher and I see that only as a good thing. Hopefully though, you cannot keep buying and returning the same game; now that would be a definite exploit that steam would need to fix.
Release good and finished products, and maybe people won’t ask for refunds.
Of course they are whinning. They have to make better games now.
Create a game which offers a worthwhile experience then the majority of customers will not look for a refund. Also price the game accordingly.
The problem is Indie developers have become far too accustomed in not having to consider unhappy customers wishing a refund. Customers refunding products is a hurdle the vast majority of producers/manufacturers/retailers face on a day to day basis and these developers should be no different.
As with all refund systems there will be those who abuse the system. As long as Valve have the system locked tight at their end then those abusers will be detected.
meanwhile the developers of postal 2 have this to say
http://i.imgur.com/MQqTVS8.png
i guess when you treat your customers with respect and people enjoy your games, they dont ask for refunds
How ironic that the one being a victm of Steam Refuns is the one that shoved their run of the mill, cellphone game into the platform, because I’m sure the real indie devs who make worthwhile indie games that are fun and worth the cash aren’t having this problem.
DEMO’S?!!
Indie developers: It’s simple. Just release a limited demo and get rid of Steam’s refund policy altogether.
On the other hand why develop for the PC? It’s the least profitable platform so focus your efforts on consoles.
“focus your efforts on consoles”
did you just sharted ? by the way idiot, it’s the most profitable platform out there after mobiles
Rrrriiiiggghhhtttt. Profitable on PC? Now I know you dropped on your head as a child.
Most profitable platform order from most to least:
Console
Mobile
PC
Not relative to budget and definitely not for indie developers.
You can get hundreds of times over your budget back on the mobile and PC platforms.
wow, just wow. how F’ed up are you ? even if you have a pile of s**t instead of brain you would have known by that the consoles are losing their touch, badly!
Where did you pull that chart from? Your a*s?
Show me a chart that provides profitability NOT revenue. Do you understand?
At least go look at VGChartz (yes less accurate than NPD) and come back with the results.
If what you posted was actually true, publishers would’ve gone out of their way to release games on PC. Clearly that isn’t happening right now. From major games being released EXCLUSIVELY on consoles to major delays in releasing PC versions of the games.
You know f’ all about the gaming market.
Maybe make better games then people won’t want a refund, simple.
Okay. After looking at games for both of them, I don’t believe it’s simply people taking advantage. Beyond Gravity is a very simple game with what amounts to flash game mechanics. Tons of free alternatives online, and even ones I’ve played that are more fun than how Gravity Beyond looks. As for PuppyGames, their games don’t seem to have much to keep a player interested. Their games to me simply are just the same thing over and over for each level, with some slight upgrades. While you COULD argue that it’s people taking advantage of the new refund policy, it’s also just as likely that people bought the games to try them out and found them not to their liking.
And there’s no reason they can’t make games longer over the 2 hours with more game play. I also feel an important question to ask is what was the average play time for each of those making returns? Did they actually beat the game? Or did they play a portion then request a refund? If the latter, then that’s far from abusing the system. Because then it’s more likely they found the game getting stale and wished for their money back.
Anyone remember few months old article “Because you are worthless” by Puppy Games? If I had a chance I would refund his games as well.
maybe dont make a sh*t game
Bad news for Ubisoft and makers of Rock Simulator. Lel.
This was always going to happen
Steam enables refunds and people now wish to get their money back for the “crap” products they purchased. How exactly is this abuse? There’s plenty of games I wish I could refund but am vastly past the time period within which I could. This just goes to show that these indies are putting out terrible products and people want their money back.
Games which have a demo / trial version should be able to get a different refund policy IMO, this would encourage developers to create demo’s in order to get less refunds, which would result in happier customers aswell since people would know if they’d like a game or not before purchasing ( excluding piracy from the equation here ).
This is finally end of single player games. Users don’t see this yet. And this will hurt major developers more than indies. Solution for developers: go online, and don’t care for users who want to play SP games.
Where the hell are you getting that from?
It might be the end of sh**ty, short casual games (thank god) but a proper singleplayer experience like the Witcher games lasts way more than two hours.
WTF ? how is this related to single player or online ? it could be worst for games like titan fall and evolved or the crew
You mean, playing the main campaign of a game like Halo reach per 2 hours and then ask for a refund, wait some time and then buy it again and play it the multilayer for 2 hours and then ask for a refund? and then…. Or what if this mean that you can have demos two hours length of every game on steam for free?, you buy alien isolation played, then refund, and pass to another game and so on until you ran out of options. Also i have played good games but due to work issues some of them never was played than a hour or just end on the stock, that could mean that the refund will not be because the game is bad, or what about you buy a game for the exciting to have it and never play for more than 2 hours and when the feels go away you just ask for a refund in order to get a hamburger instead, now that you are hungry. I think the policy is fine for consumers but it need a section for cheaters as the topic marks, that seems not exist at all at the level it must be.
We have to put up with Steam Early Access, where developers can steal your money, make false promises, and then run. A Steam Refund Policy ensures you developers get your head out of your a*s, and start making quality games!
The refund policy should accomodate short inexpensive indie games differently than they do fully priced products. If these people are paying $2 and consuming even 50% of the content then there should be no way for them to receive a refund for their purchase. Valve must intervene, work different criteria in for these indie titles. The people abusing this system should be ashamed of themselves, cheap disgusting twerps don’t deserve a place in the pc gaming community.
Need to see how long people played these games before asking for a refund. My guess is that they didn’t play them for more than 15 minutes before getting bored.
Steam’s new refund policy will definitely hurt developers who rely solely on aesthetics or gimmicks to sell their games.
In the 80s, gaming was new. It was common practice to always accept refunds for any product. Young kids who make $5 per week would buy a game, then refund it. It took about 10 years for retailers to stop accepting refunds for open boxes. I’m surprised Valve allows refunds.
Why would someone want a refund on a good game?
The problem is most indie games are rubbish or broken, you need to play loads of them to find the few good ones, these developers are just annoyed nobody wants to play their games and should spend more time improving their games and less time complaining about people wanting refunds.
i don’t think RWS has seen any number of sales for the last 3-4 years.
And yet they managed to get Postal 2 on steam, thanks to greenlight and it got in the top sellers often during steam sales.
All that income allowed them to release a new DLC called Paradise Lost.
But sure… they don’t see any sales numbers…
Also Hatred was released the same day as steam refunds. It sill got in the top of top sellers that day.
Now it’s on page 3. but still impressive for a game like that…
be that as it may, rps are still milking the first 2 games and released one of the worst games ever in postal 3 so for the last 10 years, since Apocalypse WE was released. So my sarcasm towards them is well earned.
Hatred is almost ll hype, the destruction and some of the presentation are nice but overall far less enjoyable than postal 1. But i am glad it sold well, still has nothing to do with rps and their sh*t
Postal 3 wasn’t made by RWS so I don’t think that they’d mind you calling it a bad game. I’m pretty sure they agree with you on that. They don’t even get any money off of its sales on Steam if I remember correctly.
Postal 2 has been getting updated regularly ever since they released it on Steam. They’ve been getting lots of sales on Postal 1 and 2.
ummm, Postal Redux is now a thing and it’s made by unreal4, nice 😀
Slap the Postal dude into Hatred and they’ve got the game already. :^)
really? because Postal 2 has sold more than all of Puppy games and Qwiboo games combined
see for yourself
http://steamspy.com/app/223470
http://steamspy.com/dev/Puppygames
http://steamspy.com/dev/Qwiboo+Ltd
what i am implying is everybody knows postal and what to expect from it, so people are less likely to refund. Also the game is big and you cannot tell everything about it in 2 hours. There is no comparison with a new game that you can tell everything about what it’s going to give you as value from the first 10 minutes. There is a difference between the position rws is with postal 2 and those other guys. I also implied that rws can stfu because they are non existent as a developer in todays time, they are living off an old game and the way they handled their ip by giving it to akella to crap all over an releasing such garbage shows exactly what stuff rws is made off. So imo whatever rws had to say about this is irrelevant.
they released a new DLC for Postal 2, Paradise lost, just 2 months ago, and aparently it sold well
http://store.steampowered.com/app/360960/
now it seems you for some reason have a grudge with them, but hell in my opinion, id rather have a dev that makes garbage for PC, like RWS, than a dev that ports garbage from mobile like Qwiboo
i have no grudge against them i only think they are extremely lame and they releasing this dlc backs me up. What, working on something modern using a free engine is hard right, making dlc for a 12 years old game is easier. They are irrelevant to me as game devs for the way they chose to handle their ip and their proven inability to make a good game in 12 years.
a good game is something subjective
for instance, 95% of users who played postal 2 recommend it, thats a greater percentage than any game made by puppy games or qwiboo
ok, so what good game has rws released since postal 2 ? that’s right, none. How dated is postal 2 now ? extremely. And about that last dlc, come on. It’s the same map with winter skin. It’s not even a true dlc, it’s another pathetic attempt at a cash grab by a lame a*s studio that somehow still lives off their last playable game released 12 years ago. It’s an insult to dlc. F’ RWS. And this whole article is click bait and made just so dsogaming gets publicity. Facts are never checked, there is never an in depth analysis of the subject. Let’s post this quick before the others.
You are an idiot!!
Shut up, you’re the idiot! So, you don’t like his opinion, so you call him the idiot? Epic response tactics, m8.
Flagged. Add to the discussion or GTFO.
Its sad to read some comments here, like this connos comment receiving 64 likes!, I dont know how many indie games do you have on your library, but in my library most of games are, and the most of them are good enough, others are pretty nice, others are meh. What I mean with this is that all games from AAA to indies can be good or crap but haters cant see that. Just check indie games news here and you will understand what Im talking about.
Really I dont know if to laugh or feeling sad, some idiot said every game which have 2 hours or less of “gameplay” should be free, what a stupid person, so Metal Slug, Crimzon Clover, Ikaruga, One Way Heroics and other games should be free?
At least indie games has something, you get what you see, when I bought Escape Goat I received the same graphics I saw in trailers and screen shots. But the Witcher 3 gets downgraded and people here defend CD Projekt to the death, buyer denial?
Steam gives customers all the tools to see how the game is before buying, but what Steam seems to forgot is that people doesnt want to read, then doesnt want to research, then doesnt want to see gameplay videos, NO, NO, NO people want to waste money fast, because they can, thats the capitalism they love, buying blindly.
Im glad Im not a 30 old year kid living with his parents with a lot of money to spend, I have to feed a family, so my gaming budget is limited, I have to check and re check what games I want to play even if they are a 1$. Steam reviews has been very helpful, there are short and large reviews pointing cons and pros so you decide if to read them or not.
i can say this for sure, they are more quality indie games out there than triple A games (door kickers-divinity-pillars-etc…). it hurt small games with 1 or 2 hours gameplay even with high replay value, it needs to be fixed, at least for indie games. it’s a good policy but it’s not fair for some games at the same time.
Origins has the same policy and haven’t reported any problems…….Steam has more games so they have more bad games resulting in more refunds.
Thank God. Maybe this will kill the shovelware known as ‘indies’ forever.
Indie games can be great. Some of my favorite games are from indie devs. This probably will kill off asset flippers and cash grabs though. I’m willing to sacrifice them for refunds.
If you don’t know what asset flippers are, you can watch a bit of this video to figure it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5svAoQ7D38k
Solution… make better games.
If it’s a good game, people will want to continue playing after 2 hours.
Even I like free, but if you’re only paying $2-$10 for a game then play the entire game and say “sorry, didn’t like it” that is abuse. Steam has a reputation of being fair once something has pointed out to them as being a problem. We will see.
They should make longer games then. It’s not the consumer’s fault that their crappy game can be finished in under two hours.
Do people want cheap short games on steam even if they are high quality? To a certain extent, I don’t mind letting the market work sorting out all the clutter and what you are left with are generally high quality games with depth. I believe most pc gamers feel this way. If you want to make a small game only an hour long perhaps it belongs better on a mobile platform.
I would also mention that digital store fronts such as GOG and even Origin also have refund policies which are even more generous. This is just Steam playing catch up and getting in line in what is quickly becoming an industry standard.
If a game is worth playing for more than 2 hours, people won’t refund it.
I think Indie devs abuse the community without this refund policy in place making a bland boring half finished game for $2 means that no body would spend and waste time emailing steam and making complaints for $2 I brought crap games in the past but never purse a refund because it’s to hard.
This new policy means that I play a game I don’t like for 20 minutes think wow this is terrible I want my money back it’s automatically available to me.
In the long run it will encourage devs to pick up the slack and publish games that are complete and finished
Refund should be only in High Priced games.
give pc gamers an inch and they will exploit it for miles.
It doesn’t take 2 hours to figure out a game sucks, that’s why they’re getting refunded. I guess it’s time for indie developers to step-up their game.
The policy is you can refund a game for any reason, so I’m not sure how it could be called abuse. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s the policy’s. Regardless, some of people posting here are ridiculously arrogant entitled jackasses.
I guess devs should try to make games that keep us interested for more than two hours.
Or STEAM could set a minimum price for refunds (for example, only games above 5$ would be refundable).
No, no dynamic time frame, it will just confuse the consumer…
Now that refunds are a thing, those indie devs gonna have to actually put in some real work into their game to keep their sales.
no more alpha versions or proof of concept on early access, no more broken releases tolerated (even from triple A like ubisoft, it’s gonna be instant refunds if Assassin’s Creed Syndicate does not function properly)
Keep steam refunds this way and let the indie devs adapts or perish.
PS: funny how a game like hatred sold so well almost the same day steam refunds was launched…
It’s like, when you put effort into your game, people are going to play it and keep it.
Cry me a river, most indie games i’ve played, Have been real crappy even with great reviews, most of them, straight mobile to pc ports, so you know what, maybe people refund because now they have a chance to not be scammed into buying sh**ty ports or just bad indie games. and a 20 minute refund policy? give me a break, 20 minutes is not enough at least 45 minutes,
If you csn grt bored of a gsme in 2 hours you deserve a refund. Procedurally generated games have no designed structure. I’ve played loads of them they are boring skill tests devoid of anything but pixel twitching challenge.
You want me to buy your game then make a game of it.
gameindustry . biz in short = your mom’s a**
“Show me a chart that provides profitability NOT revenue”
lol, see the chart again, all 3 s**tbox combined and still has less revenue in terms of game sales.
“yes less accurate than NPD”
it’s not inaccurate, it’s completely made up, it’s a s**ty unreliable source. also NPD=/=whole world, it’s just usa and it won’t cover digital sales.
“and come back with the results”
you know that s**t source of yours don’t cover digital sales, right ? and on PC games sold digitally. ofcourse you don’t know that cuz your a s**tbrain.
“If what you posted was actually true”
it’s 100% true, but they are more games on PC than all 3 consoles combined, because of there are more games they are more revenue.
“publishers would’ve gone out of their way to release games on PC”
they are doing it now, MGS and WWE and valkyria chronicles or koei games etc…
“From major games being released EXCLUSIVELY on consoles”
what major games are you talking about ? exclusively on consoles ? which one ? i see more exclusivity on PC than consoles, also don’t forget that you owned by MS or Sony and PC gamers are free from those kind of companies, maybe MS or Soney could pay money to a dev or publisher to make a timed exclusive deal with them but thats all you can get.
“major delays in releasing PC versions”
again which one ? most of the games will release the same time, some sell better on consoles and some on PC, cod and assassin’s creed games are more popular on consoles, xcom or civ games or totalwar series or most survival games are more popular on PC. how is it feel when nobody owns PC gaming but PCGamers still get more exclusives ? i know how you feel, trust me crying wont help, free yourself or stay where you are just like a slave.
“You know f’ all about the gaming market”
you don’t know s**t about anything, of course you don’t, you own a potato, they own you and they contol you. how does shilling feels for a company that don’t gives a F about you ?
This is the best thing steam has ever done for the community of developers, its going to force indie developers to actually make good games
Hmm it didn’t happen before? Well maybe because there was no refund option before?
20 minutes? What if I have to go buy lunch, make a phone call or take a sh*t. Damn, wasted 2$.
Steam’s finally getting the backs of customers, and not these indies flooding the market. If their game is that bad that people don’t like it after trying it, then maybe they should be in a different field of work.
Without information regarding how much playtime these refunds had, how can one judge? Maybe the refunds are after only a few minutes?
Regardless, this is most likely compliance with EU law regarding returns. It’s entirely possible Valve has no legal choice. Of course, no mentions of attempts to contact Valve regarding this.
This is what ‘journalism’ has become, propaganda for your friends? One of the games just coming off a ‘sale’ so sales dropped and that is unexpected?
Sorry, there doesn’t appear to be any fire, the smoke appears to be from a fog machine, and the developers appear to have sour grapes over their products not selling well. Too many variables to assume refund abuse.
You now, retailers have had refund policies for a huge amount of time, but the vast majority of people don’t abuse them anyway. I wonder why that is? What about digital products makes you think people treat them differently? I acknowledge some do, but those people weren’t going to buy your game anyway.
Indie devs should look at this as an opportunity. More people trying their game is more potential customers. Even refund abusers who like your game will give it a good rating, good word of mouth, and are more likely to lead to a sale you wouldn’t have had otherwise. So someone doesn’t pay you who wouldn’t have paid you anyway; did it cost you something? Do you gain good will that may convert a non-paying customer into a paying one later?
Does your bad attitude now look anti-consumer and drive potential customers away?
Indie devs, you are also business people. Maybe you’re doing this for the art, but you’re still selling your products. Complaining about a refund policy makes you look like bad actors; your product look like a bad product, and degrades your business.
Of course, Puppy Games is already familiar with crapping on his customers so no wonder he’s willing to do it again. I recommend just avoiding anything Puppy Games makes now, or in the future. Then he won’t have to deal with you or give you support for your crappy computer that’s obviously the problem with is game, even if his game is the only thing you ever have problems with. (Hint, I am not and won’t be your customer in any way Puppy Games; I’m sure that makes you happy).
Check your sources and your facts, DSOgaming. You look like ‘useful idiots’.
Indie is an “emo” of our time. They’re also useless, they think that gamer society “doesn’t understand” their “creation”. But in fact they are just pixel sh*t makers. Not all of them, but puppygames 100%
“A movie that lasts 120 minutes and costs 5x as much is a joke and should be free”
Makes exactly as much sense.
It’s not about the length of the game. It’s about having enough time test and see if it matches your expectations, or is actually stable on your system.
No, it doesn’t. Movies are an entirely different form of entertainment. They’re not at all comparable to video games. At all.
It’s the Age of Entitlement. Same way some gamers would pirate a title “to try out” and justify it by claiming it is fair because a demo was not made available. Such asinine logic is bound to pop up soon enough.
Once can argue what is fair or not, but the situation is that Valve made these changes and it is now within the consumer’s privilege to refund their purchases regardless on how the devs feel about it.
So the ball is now on Valve’s court to address the situation.
I for one like this policy as Steam’s indie scene is a mess (Mostly due to Early Access and Greenlight) and this could be use to pressure developers (both AAA and Indie) to raise their standards.
I’d like to see a clause that refunds are nullified on titles that offer a demo for their product, give devs a chance to fight back against the abuse.
I’d like to know what the author’s definition of “a lot of gamers” is.
if their games is not good, why we have to be stuck with that games in our library.
refund option is a must. that’s one way to force indie developer to make a good and decent game for once.
hoorayyy for good indie games !!
There is probably only such a high rate of refunds right now because its new, it will stabilize over time. Also people who wouldn’t have even thought to buy your indie game before are now buying them and trying them because they have nothing to lose.
That is good for indie devs because this means entirely NEW customers are now picking up and trying your game and some of them will end up buying them. This is a long term bet by valve to generate new customers and I think they have got it right.
Is Steam removing casual games from indie developers?
Make better, longer games and not shovelware and lazy mobile ports. Problem solved.
Ok so it’s people abusing the feature rather than maybe people decided there is no reason not to try a game like that and they didn’t care for it (ie saw it has limited gameplay) and requested a refund. Gotcha. Got to make everyone seem like they want everything for free.
Let me know when indie games that may actually have some real substance are seeing a big refund impact rather than things like that.
I would be much more interested in seeing things like
-Total number of people who own the game
-Average play time of all owners
-Average play time of only people that wrote reviews
-Average play time of only people who did NOT write reviews
-Number of people that wrote a positive review and then got a refund
I’m willing to bet those numbers would shed some light on this “abuse”.
The real crime here is that I can’t get a refund for Aliens: Colonial Marines.
All the games puppgames makes fall apart game-play wise after the first 30 minutes, this article should be titled “People using steam refunds the way it was meant to be used”
“As Qwiboo tweeted, out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That has never happened before as Qwiboo noted”
How was this supposed to happen without the option to do so? Otherwise, indie game or not, 2 hours to finish it isn’t much.
The new refund policy is absolutely retarded. It’s like Steam turned into rent a game for free service. So why not play a game over a weekend and return it?
Better than someone pirating those games. If a game has less that 2 hours of content. I can understand. But other than that, tough titty!
We need a lot more data on this before I buy that this is a mass problem of people cheating devs. Also if your game has less than 2 hours of content… I’ve got 99cent android games with massive content or replay ability.
The Apple and Android markets support refunds and this hasn’t killed indie games there. Far to soon and far to little data for me to believe this is a problem yet.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
total biscuit does actual research on this unlike some sites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPUToCNq-iA
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…
“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.
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.
“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…
This article just got rekt by TotalBiscuit!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPUToCNq-iA
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
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.
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!
“It’s still too early to speak” …… but you’re going to do a whole article on it anyway, right? -_-
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1708
I wonder if that’ll clear anything up.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
and i thought pirating was some big deal, this is a whole new beast huh.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
“mandatory demo”
valve can’t screw with big guys (ubisoft/rockstar/activision/warner/etc…) but they (big guys) can screw with anyone else
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.
i know, i’m not disagreeing with you at all
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.
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
Yeah, I remember that. There’s even an elixir on the stairs.
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.
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*
Pro tip – if “a game lasts two hours”, maybe the devs should not be selling it but giving it away.
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.
AHAHAHAH good… i hate indie games
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?