If you’re planning to refund a game. Just pirate it
You have to trust the source where you download to pirate it.
Just gotta find a decent private tracker and keep your ratio good.
I mean I have a hard time trusting hacked and pirated games, that they do not contain anything harmful. It’s been a long time since I pirated a PC game. We talk about Windows XP from my experience here. xD
You can trust cracked games if you do your research on release groups etc. As I Arch user, I’m more afraid of AUR than most cracked games tbh. Not at all worried if the game is from a trusted release with a good track record. Some of these groups as been at it for decades now.
I don’t know how you can compare the AUR to this situation. With the AUR, if you know what you are doing, then you can check the script yourself. You don’t have to trust in good faith.
True true, probably a bad comparison, I see that. However, my experience is that virus-like game cracks gets nuked. No way to be totally safe.
all this will do is discourage an obviously talented developer from ever publishing another game.
good job gamers, you’re just as toxic as everyone believes you are.
It’s not “gamers”, it’s just people, some of which are nobs who one shouldn’t listen too
ok. “people who game”, aka gamers.
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.)
Depends if the game set some expectation for a 10 hour long campaign or not I’d say.
That’s the thing they always tell you. It isn’t a mobile platform, people are prepared to pay higher prices but you need to set expectations with those prices.
If you’re charging $15 for a game people are going to expect at least 10ish hours of gameplay, if it’s going to be under that you want to be sub $10.
Although having said that I think I only paid £12 for Minecraft (about $15) and I’m probably thousands and thousands of hours into that.
I tried Buckshot Roulette on gamepass last night. That would 100% be getting refunded if it was anything more than 50p.
Yeah thats game was annoyingly short. I wouldnt blame anyone for refunding it.
You’re supposed to escape. And then get the white telephone. That takes many hours.
id feel like i got fuckin ripped off if it was an hour long, this isn’t a complicated game and even with the low price id refund it. then again id never buy this game in the first place cuz i already hold that view point.
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.
What about that? If they bought it, but haven’t played it, yet, should they not have to pay for for it?
Or does that somehow make people buying an indie game and bragging about having fun completing the game, then refunding it afterwards, look better?
Developer Mateo Covic, who went viral for complaining that thousands of people had refunded his game after finishing it in less than two hours, says he’s not actually unhappy about the number of refunds or money he lost, or even Steam’s policy in general—he was merely expressing frustration with players who “bragged about having a fun time with the game and refunding it after completion.”
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.
Easy fix: have a two-hour intro video that you can’t skip ;-)
Kojima: “what’s so special about that?”
“Only two hours? Oh man ive wasted so much effort…”
yah that deff won’t make the review bombing worse…
Honestly that game looks pretty fun, especially as a two player game. Just keep it after you beat it and play it with someone else. Or play it again at varying levels of inebriation.
Were they not aware of the refund policy when they listed their game for sale on the platform?
I guess they didn’t expect people to be such freeloading assholes to play their game in full and then take back their money.
That kind of dumb people are why we have to deal with huge exploitative game companies instead of having more indie devs
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I guess they didn’t expect people to be such freeloading assholes to play their game in full and then take back their money.
Have they even given evidence that their game is significantly more refunded than any other game? Or did they see X amount of people refunding the game and declaring that they must have done it because they’re evil?
Well, yea. Giving great reviews and then refunding, as one example.
As if a good review alone was payment enough
Ah, yes, of course a single isolated example is indicative of an endemic issue /s
Single and isolated? You know that there are statistics about completion and play duration. It’s easy to see how many play it fully and THEN refund.
I wonder if the article says anything about that
Covic said the tweet that started all of this was something of a misstatement: The 20% refund rate on Paddle Paddle Paddle is actually pretty normal for a “rage game”
So the dev is just whining on social media then because they’re an entitled prick.
Doubling down on the idiocy I see. You could have avoided see me like a prick for the second time if you would just read the the whole article rather than cherry picking a bit of it that reinforces whatever random point it is you’re trying to make.
he’s not actually unhappy about the number of refunds or money he lost, or even Steam’s policy in general—he was merely expressing frustration with players who “bragged about having a fun time with the game and refunding it after completion.”
Which I think is fair enough.
They claimed this is their stance, yet they’re calling on Valve to update their refund policy to not make it possible. That doesn’t add up.
see me like a prick
Ironic
It’s going to be a tiny minority of people doing that, but there probably ought to be a basic check to see if you got the achievement for completing the game before letting you refund it. Maybe not for YouTube rageslop like this, but for the smaller “experience” games, like Unpacking or something.
Realistically a lot of people are treating the refund system as a demo. I know on PS+ there’s the option on a lot of games to play it for two hours before having to buy it. I guess the PC is a bit too open to allow for that. Could offer that by playing it in the nebulous “cloud” I suppose.
It really is a tiny minority. A handful of reviews said they did it specifically for that. That’s it.
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It’s a game that costs £2.39.
On sale**
$5 otherwise
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Realistically need a better solution for refunds, especially for indie devs. 2 hours just isn’t enough time for shitty games to reveal themselves sometimes, but its also more time than some absolute gems take to beat.
People mentioned achievements, but thats unreliable as even I can spoof achievements on steam last I checked.
Valve can’t be expected to manage every refund request thoroughly, and devs can’t exactly be trusted to respect those requests if they were in charge of them being its literally losing money, but theres gotta be some way to reliably refund a customer without it being abused to harm an innocent dev.
Agreed, if the 2 hour timer was reduced, we’d just see a bunch of nasty developers take advantage of it with games that are front loaded and then nothing as we have in the past.
It sucks for honest people on both sides of the equation.
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I have never refunded a game on Steam. But then, I usually wait to buy a game until it’s been out for a while and usually on sale.
According to all the statistics I have ever seen, especially from devs who’ve made short games, this isn’t an actual problem.
Almost like you could check the reviews and realize there are serious problems with using co-op in a game that is designed for co-op
This is going to translate into “more sells” same as drm.
People who want to pay will pay. People who doesn’t want to pay won’t ever pay. With digital media there’s objectively any loss if someone who didn’t pay played your game. So just let it be, you are not going to sell more just because you removed or made smaller the steam refund window.
“More sells” is a giant leap past “make your game longer tham 2 hours”.
Especially when there’s no real proof out there that this game is getting refunded significantly more.
Remember, some people love to just complain, especially if it suggests that the people that don’t like them are evil
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
No understanding of art here.
If it’s being made for art, then who cares if it’s being returned or not. It’s being enjoyed. If you want to capitalize on your art then you need to take the trade off of it getting returned if your artistic vision is shorter than the return window
if theyre also review bombing its cuz its not good, friend slop became a term for a reason and its likely being applied here.
Tagging the official Steam account, Covic wrote on X, “This should not be possible. Would be cool if you could finally do something about your refund policy… Got dozens of reviews like that and 21% refund rate even though the reviews are 90% very positive… That’s over 55,000 Refunds btw.”
The review bombing happened after he contacted steam regarding the multitudes of people refunding the game after completing it
ah, ok.
