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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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The people who legitimately do this are the ones who make the rest of the gamers look bad.
If you bought a game, especially for $3, played it from start to finish over the course of an hour and a half, and then bragged about it when you refunded it. You fully deserve to have your refund capability disabled.
The thing is, though, I don't really know a way that this can be implemented without allowing publishers to game the system. I do personally think that Two Hours is a little generous for the overall story because I will generally know whether or not I'm going to like a game within 35 minutes of playing.
I think a good alternative to it is have your refund window be based off of the current sale price of the game.
So for a game that's less than five bucks, you would only have somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour of a refund window.
Then for your typical indie window, which would be like fifteen to thirty dollars, you have an hour to hour and a half then your AAA title pricing of ~60, you have two or three hours.
I can understand refunding a game if it's broken on your system or just trash, but it feels real sleazy to me to spend money on a game, play it to completion, and then refund it anyway.
It largely depends on the type of game. There's are plenty of games I've played where you're still in the tutorial after 2 hours. Hell, I don't think I knew if I liked EU4 until I was like 50+ hours in.
You don't need 2 hours to figure out if you like Super Meat Boy though. You'll know in less than an hour. Probably less than that.
For those who wonder how you could play a game for 50+ hours and not know if you like it; it's a grand strategy game with lots of functionally. A full game can easily be 50+ hours depending on how fast you let the game run, and your first game is definitely going to have a lot of pausing trying to figure out various functionality. First game is or two is just figuring out the basic gameplay.
If you play a game for 50+ hours, you liked it. You don’t spend that amount of time being undecided.
You'd be wrong. Though you could say I didn't hate it at least. But I certainly hadn't made up my mind yet.
I played the first game with a friend. Which is largely why I even finished it. It's pretty overwhelming because you're left to figure out a lot on your own. Second game I played on my own. After that is when I knew I liked it, or at least toward the end of that second game.
I can't think of anything other than grand strategy games that I've been that indecisive over. Everything else has been within like 3 hours. Some barely even 20 minutes.
Nah, you liked it. You don’t keep going back to a game for 50 hours if you don’t like it. Most people don’t even put 50 hours into games they like.
I agree. We're not discussing "liking a game" in the context of whether or not it deserves 5 stars; we're talking about whether or not you're going to demand a refund. There's clothing I regretted buying after 50 hours of wear, but by that point I've taken off the tag and it's gone through a laundry cycle. I'd be considered trashy to take that back to the store even if within the return window.
The amount of people downvoting me, saying that playing a game for 50+ hours doesn’t mean you like it, is absolutely mind-boggling.
This might sound dumb but why not have it so that if you get the achievement for beating the game you can't refund it?
I suspect a big goal of this refund policy is to make steam self moderating. Valve don’t want to have to police individual games more than absolutely necessary.
If devs can game it by giving players the completion achievement the moment they launch the game, suddenly valve has to step in to solve the problem, and they are far too busy enjoying their enormous profits to actually do work
I feel like only the really dodgy games would do that, it would be a very blatant exploitation of the system. Just have a section in the refund request that says "the game gave me the achievement erroneously" or something and then you can look into it if there's enough reports. Yes Steam has to step in occasionally, but that's inevitable unless you're happy with one side or the other getting screwed.
Like would any real game by a publisher do this? It'd tank their reputation by a huge amount. A lot of gamers care a huge amount about achievements so to get the 100% achievement on boot would actually really annoy them too. I just don't see it happening.
The only other solution I can think of is for developers to just never release a game that can be completed in under 2 hours. Which is just silly.
What if it was 10% of achievements or something then? Then it would be extremely obvious if someone got a bunch all at startup
I think we might just need to make steam employees actually work, I'm sorry, there's no easy away around it.
They still get to massively profit off of the huge cuts their platform takes though, obviously
Dang. Actually hiring like 1 human? What a travesty
That would be too easy to game or abuse by the devs
Oh I get you there.
I played The Witcher 3 for over a hundred hours and didn’t realize I didn’t like it until I went to have a threesome with Triss and Yennefer and instead got left with blue balls.
I would have returned that game right then and there if I could have.
Maybe have a new rule for shorter games, like if its reasonable to complete the game normally in under 5 hours then the 2 hour window should be 1 hour or even 30 minutes. Idk how games are submitted but it should be an option at that time on how long the game is or a question about if its over or under x hours long so they know how to treat the game for this policy.
That’s where the abuse comes in, because how can you be sure a developer won’t make a short game and list it as 20hrs to complete?
A dev that is abusing the system is going to be delisted by Valve real quick, methinks.
I mean databases like howlongtobeat.com do exist. Steam could also come up with their own numbers by looking at the average playtime when players get the achievement for winning the game.
Issue with both is, the game needs to already have been released and beaten a few times.
A developer can still game an achievement.
Enough rules, enough automations, I say, just make steam actually hire some real customer service humans. What? They can't afford it?
This would only work if the game participates in regional pricing, otherwise you're fucking over most people who don't deal in USD. $15 to you is not just $15 to everyone else.
I don't see how this would be too much of an issue. If it's that way in one region, then it would be unilateral all across all regions. Price wouldn't really matter at that point as long as you're using the same guideline
So not only are people paying more than you're paying because the value of the dollar is higher in their country, the money they're paying is now at a higher risk because they have a smaller refund window.
You would be essentially taking an existing issue and making it worse.
you are forgetting though that a 5$ USD game isn't going to magically becomes < 5$ USD though. if its using the same framework even if the game is only worth 2$ native, its still 5$ USD and therefore would be the same. Regional pricing doesn't matter in the scenario.
I am not, and that was not the point. The point is if you're paying $5, and someone in a non-USD region is paying $5, they're taking a bigger risk than you if the game ends up sucking because $5 is worth more in their region.
Lowering the refund period for everyone without regional pricing means people in underprivileged regions are taking on more risk than you are; ergo, you're punishing them for being underprivileged, and making a bad situation worse.
~~you are misunderstanding.~~ I'm saying pick a region for the guideline, if its $5 on that region the game has that refund period. Then apply regional pricing. There's zero reason to apply a framework for every region that's more work then needed. the lower regional price would have the same refund period as the standard pricing as its following the same framework. The fact its lower price does not matter, as regions do not matter.
Then the only time it would need to be region based, is if they sold a region specific SKU such as some Japanese or Australian releases instead of having to go in and select refund periods for every period in every region. That's way more work than is needed.
edit: i misread a core part of this chain, oops
I don't think I am. The issue is not that your system won't work with regional pricing, it's that it will not work without it.
Yeah, that's the issue. Some games do not opt into regional pricing, so the price never gets lowered, which means they will be paying $5 and have, for example, only 1 hour to refund the game, just like someone in the US. Their having to pay $5 is already an issue, and now they have even less time to refund it if it sucks.
I never adovacted for this. You can tie the refund period to money paid, no problem. You do not need a different refund period framework for every region, and I don't understand why you think I'm pushing for this to begin with. It's fine as long as you enforce regional pricing for everyone, which's not something Steam will do.
At this point, I'm not sure where our disconnect is so I'm not really sure how else to clarify, im not sure how you read what I sent and somehow got that it has any attachment to regional pricing. The framework I'm talking about would not require regional pricing at all because the only price it cares about is what the price is in the chosen region.
The system I'm advocating would work with or without regional pricing because the region's price doesn't matter.
As an example, say their chosen region is the US and they decide that $5 means it's a 30 minute return.
But then they have another region that is two dollars.
It doesn't matter that it's $2 in that region because the region that is used for the metric is $5.
So the $2 game that is regional pricing would have the return policy of the $5 game because the region that they use for the calculations has it at $5. As a further example, the inverse would be true as well. If it was $10 in the associated region, since the framework region is $5, the $10 game would have the $5 policy
I'm not sure why it needs to be so complicated to have specific return policies for every single region. At the end of the day the value in the framework region is isolated from the framework and no changes to its price would change its return policy as it doesn't matter
I am not advocating for this. I do not understand why you think I'm advocating for this when I never brought it up.
Please re-read my last comment.
ah sorry, yea I reread it when I got on my pc and I can see where I misunderstood your position,
as for where I got the concept from:
and then
since my post was about having it be based off a policy on pricing based off the current price, I took that as a message stating that it requires regional pricing to work. So I jumped the gun a little and thought you meant that you were advocating that for it to work, they would need regional pricing on everything as such would require regional based refunds for those areas, but I can see where I got overzealous on that so I apologize.
My opinion is still the same on it though, I think it would be better to implement that system than to not, even if the dev doesn't participate in regional pricing at all, worst case scenario is it's a static price with a static return based off the only price available and the buyer would know that going into it. I could see how it could negativly impact the buyer like you said but, if the seller is already not participating with regional pricing, there isn't much else that can be done to fix that. Maybe keep the current system if the game is is bought in a region and not with regional pricing? but I don't think that would really work either as it could just enable the abuse in those regions still. It can definitely work without regional pricing but, preferably if the dev wants to have sales, they really should enable it.
Also as an addition because I didn't mention it, I used USD as an example because it's what is generally used for an example, obviously said framework could be any region as long as it's consistant across every game so it's not confusing. Honestly steam could likely even supply a exchange tool to auto do the exchange across all denominations. They do that already for payouts/purchases