Indie Developer Quits Game Development Due to Steam’s Two-Hour Refund Policy

[Tsing]

Image: Steam



Steam offers a very nice refund policy that allows unsatisfied gamers to get their money back for any reason, so long as the playtime of a title hasn’t exceeded two hours and the refund is initiated within two weeks of purchase. This is an excellent, pro-consumer policy, as it’s hard to determine just how well a particular game might run and whether it has any horrible bugs, especially at launch.



“You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason,” Valve says. “Maybe your PC doesn’t meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn’t like it.”



It doesn’t seem to be working out too well for some game developers, however.



Indie developer Emika Games took to Twitter today to tell its followers that it will no longer be making games and quitting development “for an indefinite...

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[Brian_B]

Huh.

They could, I dunno, use something other than Steam.

 

[Grimlakin]

Yea that's kind of **** for users to do to a cheap indie game that they apparently enjoyed.

 

[DrezKill]

If this guy is complaining about 2 hours, he wouldn't like GOG's 30 day return policy.

 

[Brian_B]

Also, if I can beat your game in 2 hrs to catch a refund and don’t see any value in it past that — you should be rethinking your career for reasons other than a return policy

 

[hubaduba]

Here's a crazy idea - make a game with content, that takes longer to finish than I spend taking a dump each week.

 

[MadMummy76]

The butthurt is strong with this one. Maybe if you made a game that people don't want to return then you wouldn't have this problem.

Reminds me of Adrian Chmielarz and Ballad of Ethan Carter or whatever was it called.

 

[Dan_D]

If your game takes more than two hours to finish and doesn't suck, you won't have to worry about this. It's a pretty reasonable policy for Steam I think. if a game doesn't grab my attention in an hour or so it probably never will.

 

[Riccochet]

I've used the policy before because the games were trash.

I've also kept a handful for opposing reasons. Think I beat Firewatch in like 4 hours, but the game was good.

Devs should realize that people don't pay for trash.