If you refund an indy game that you completed, you're a sociopath and there's no helping you. There isn't a structural system that's going to prevent that, some people are complete human garbage

How about all the people who bought it without even playing? This is a even larger number than the refunders.

This indie dev made a hit game that sold pretty well btw.

If you're planning to refund a game. Just pirate it

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.

Maybe not in this particular case: but what if you buy a game intending to get 10 hours out of it and after 1h you get greeted by the final credits. Shouldn't you not be able to refund then? (Depending on the price of course.)

Were they not aware of the refund policy when they listed their game for sale on the platform?

keep in mind, its partially overblown because according to the acheivements, only 7% users have actually beat the game of the people who kept it. the people who refunded shouldnt be that different than the average.

most of the people refunding are more likely people who rage quit more than people who beat the game in 2 hours

not saying its not an. ass move to refund but the people who refunded arent statisically the people who beat it.

Easy fix: have a two-hour intro video that you can't skip ;-)

According to all the statistics I have ever seen, especially from devs who've made short games, this isn't an actual problem.

I have to imagine this was this risk the developer should have considered when making a game shorter than the return window.

The platform shouldn’t have to intervene because the developer didn’t properly evaluate risk when releasing the game

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

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

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

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