Well thought out article, sir.

Existing policy my *ss.

I bought The Darkness II on a steam sale because I heard good things about it and the trailer on the steam page made it look neat. After I bought it, I noticed the "WARNING: VERSION IN YOUR COUNTRY IS CENSORED" disclaimer. I wrote to steam saying "hey, I know there is a warning, but the trailer on the steam page, because of which I bought the game, shows things that are not in my version. You can see that I played 0 hours of the game, I haven't even downloaded it yet, so could I please get a refund?" and the answer was basically "nah you bought it already".

So no, they used to be really hardheaded about this. At least in some cases.

@austin_walker Great story. I've seen most outlets just reporting it and giving a quick opinion and that's that. You actually did some legwork and talked to people -- and it's really well-written. Already a demonstrable cut above. Keep it up!

Sweet, now I can get a refund for that fucked up version of KOTOR II.

Interesting that Valve are testing this at the same time Hatred is released..

@austin_walker said:
For all of its clarity, I still have some lingering questions about this new policy. As written, this policy doesn't offer any special terms for games in Early Access. What happens with a game that I've had for a month but that now seems abandoned?

It's clear enough on a store page that a game is in Early Access & there's pretty clear wording that the game is not complete & may not progress. It even says to wait on purchasing the game if you're unsure. I'd hate to lose the potential of early access because of people treating it like pre-ordering.

LOL good thing I'd used my "one time refund" long ago...

Won't know until it's in the wild for a bit, but Valve probably has something in place to identify people trying to abuse it for free indie games. Though I think the people that go to that kind of effort would just pirate, anyway.

From what i've read, it's completely automated. People getting refunds between 5 minutes and 3 hours away.

While this sounds pretty black and white the guys at Valve are smart. It's not super tough to figure out if a player has beaten most games. Almost every game released on Steam these days has achievements and there is almost always at least one achievement for beating the game. So that is an easy way to stem abuse from people trying to "rent" games from Steam. Another way might be to use cloud saves that let developers basically check off a variable once a certain action has occurred in the game that would mean the player is past the point where the game can be refunded. Or you could go with, say, a 10% of the average playtime as the amount of time you get before a game isn't valid for a refund. That would of course be a lot more effort on Valve's part as they would have to create an easy to monitor system that would let people know when they are nearing that point, but it seems like the most fair way to handle this.

Wonderful! I can think of more than one occasion where I really regretted a high priced purchase. I just can't believe they've gone this long without implementing a program like this, but better late than never I suppose.

You can get a refund if you have bought it within 14 days of the purchase of the game. In some cases it is probably possible to get a refund even beyond 14 days if Valve decides so. Why would the terms for early access games be any different from the released games since they both take your cash?

Early access games dont really have nothing to worry about if they are released in a functional state but there are some games which arent really ready for early access.

Maybe with the refund option future early access games will be a bit more polished. I for one will willingly take a reduced number of early access games with more polish in them than a large number of early access games which are released in various functional states.

Great policy for steam to have, should help with a lot of those rubbish reviews being posted by people not even bothering to debug the technical issues.

@nardak: Austin was raising a question about requesting refunds well past the 14 day mark of early access purchases for the sake of games that lose support and don't actually release. HoneMcBone was making a point that those purchases should be treated as any other purchase, in terms of the refund policy, because the consumer bought into early access knowing that it wasn't a full game that was guaranteed to maintain support.

Tl;DR - Austin: Should Early Access have more lenient refund policy? HoneMcBone: nah, same policy for all purchases.

This will make me want to try out early access games more, to check if there is actually any content there or if the performance is bad.

I'm also wondering how refunds will work for short, narrative driven games like Three Fourths Home or Sunset, which can be completed in just a couple of hours of play. What happens if I beat one of these games, then file for a refund? Thankfully, I was able to get the opinions of a few developers on this new policy. Will O'Neill, whose own game, Actual Sunlight, can be beaten in about 90 minutes, told me that he is "confident that this initial policy will be refined to meet the needs of games that can clearly demonstrate a full play-through of less than two hours."

While I was concerned with short, narrative games, developer Rusty Moyher was thinking about even shorter, non-narrative ones. "It seems to me that two hours might be too generous? How many games of Super Hexagon could play in an hour?" He makes a good point, which should remind us that it's incredibly hard to craft a "one size fits all" policy for anything.

Thankfully, Moyher also told me that Valve is asking developers for feedback on refunds. Hopefully, with feedback from devs, they'll be able to sort out a policy that works for games (and game makers) of different sizes.

I don't think this refund policy can be fixed for shorter games. I can complete Dinner Date in 15 minutes. Are you going to refuse my refund because I "completed" the game in that time? Shorter games will fall by the wayside and that's fine. I doubt there will be an influx of people going out of their way to play Dinner Date for free because of this. It's too much of a hassle.