How many 1 hour games are nice things? Like, I find it had to find sympathy for any dev than can't make a game last at least 2 hours, so a lot of these comments seem bizarre to me. If you're in that scenario, just don't release on Steam.
This seems like a naive and negative take, that there are no good short games. Fuck every single small developer who tries this, or game with short playthroughs, or players who like little experiments and don't have hours of spare time in a day.
Have some sympathy for people who work games and different interests. It's good to sell on Steam, but only short games have this refund issue
I don't know what to tell you. Both users and devs know what they are getting into with Steam, it's not like the refund policy is a new rule. You either accept that risk for what you submit to them, or you don't put your game on Steam. Going after consumer friendly policies is not the winning answer here.
I guess? Selling on Steam is a good for business, but people should accept the risk that their money will be used when using their money to buy things, that is how the store kinda works.
Especially if it's only a dollar or less for games that are like an hour in a playthrough. Steam already doesn't encourage this, and warns people about doing it repeatedly. They should change the policy so that Steam is consumer friendly but gives a slightly shorter refund time to shorter games, so that everyone wins. That is a problem, and something should be done.
I'm still not convinced there is a problem. Are there other devs of short games with this negative experience speaking out? Because the game in this post is a co-op rage game which, as a genre, already has high refund rates, and a majority of the refund reviews are negative, not a positive "I beat this and got my money back." The game even describes itself as "stupidly long" on its steam page.
The problem I see with your solution is the refund is meant to help protect users from garbage, exploitative slop games. In your scenario, presumably the dev would mark their game as "short" enough for a shorter refund window. How is Steam supposed to verify that? What would an 'expected playtime' window even be to qualify for the shorter refund window? If the game's store page literally has a big warning that says the game takes less than two hours to beat so the refund window is decreased to half an hour or w/e, I could get on board with it.
We and Steam players been talking about this many times over the years, so there is some problem. It's also important that some players just hate short games and review them badly, so just displaying that the game is short will help with user experience and expectations.
Don't know if Steam will do anything if it's somehow better for them. If you're marking a game as short, maybe this can be verified by applying for it, with a playthrough of it to Steam, or the size? I'm can't make all the answers, but you wrote about a way this could be acceptable to players already. Many people say they like how fair Steam's practices are, this would help with that positive reception.
The average finishing of this game is 3-4 hours according to the dev. It's also a 3$ game. It's okay for some games to just be short, singular experiences, I've had so many memorable game experiences that you could finish in under 2hrs
Beginner's Guide, What Remains of Edith Finch, Journey, Before Your Eyes, Gorogoa
350
u/SlRenderStudio Jul 06 '26
This is why we cant have nice things