Last week Valve incorporated a basic consumer right for its Steam platform: the ability to exchange your digital games for a refund. As long as you own the game for less that 14 days, and you’ve played it for less than two hours, you can return the game. Sounds good, although there’s one issue: some games – mostly indies – are two hours or less.
According to Destructoid , developer Qwiboo posted some appalling sales stats for their game, Beyond Gravity , on Twitter. “It’s refunds. Out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That’s 72% of purchases. Rate of refunds before was minimal. #SteamRefunds.” Keep in mind that Beyond Gravity takes about an hour to complete.
Clearly the refund policy is not without its faults; however, I still support it. Aside from any terrible games that players want to get rid of from their ever-expanding backlog, the system is great for consumers who’ve mistakenly purchased a game that’s too powerful for their computer.
While some consumers may want more bang for their buck in terms of quantity, some games, like Gone Home or Jazzpunk, don’t need to be padded with excess hours. Let’s hope this issue is fixed soon–especially for the sake of developers like Qwiboo.
Source: Destructoid