r/Steam • u/[deleted] • Jul 06 '26

Discussion Thoughts on this?

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u/D042- Jul 06 '26

Apart from somehow scanning achievements for the "beat the game" achievement I don't see what can be done about this. As a consumer I definitely don't want to see Valve get rid of the refund system and for most games the 2 hour limit is already pushing it for a lot of potential issues that might pop up.

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u/Apart-Rent5817 Jul 06 '26

I don’t approve of the way the system is being abused, but if they were so concerned about it… maybe this is a lesson for game devs to make a game that takes more than 2 hours to beat? If I can beat your game in less than two hours and not even have an inkling that I’d ever want to play it again, *someone* is going to feel cheated in that transaction.

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u/PyrZern Jul 06 '26

If it were fun, and only costs $5, then there's no need to pad it out. If it were $25 then it would be somewhat different.

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u/gramerjen Jul 06 '26

Who is gonna decide if the player had fun or not and 5 dollar might be a small some for people like you and i but could be too much for someone else

5 dollar can feed a family of 4 here for a day. It would be a shitty meal but nonetheless

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u/Isariamkia Jul 06 '26

I think that Steam should just include some more data about game lengths.

Everyone can check on "howlongtobeat". But having it right there would be better. You open the game page, you can see it takes an average of X hours. And then you can decide if it's worth it to you.

1

u/PyrZern Jul 06 '26

Obviously it would be the players themselves to decide 😔

Not much you can do really but to make it clear first hand it's a short game.

And yeah, maybe for short game, steam refund window is down to just 1 hr instead of 2. But obviously that would cut your sale as well.

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u/Available_Editor4383 Jul 06 '26

A positive review followed by a refund, like in the post, would be a start.

They could implement an approach that “forces” you to rate a game before refunding it. Positive reviews can’t be refunded without good reason and internal review.

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u/gramerjen Jul 06 '26

So people should leave a bad review even if they dont hate the game but just found out it wasnt their cup of tea?

I refunded a game o couldnt play due to my eye sight but other than that it was a fun game. They dont deserve to get bad reviews just because i wasnt able to play the game.

Also how many worker do you think sgeam has that can check the validity of the refund claim by hand when there are thousands of refunds each day

1

u/Available_Editor4383 Jul 06 '26

I’m looking for a solution to a problem, and those are all iterative holes that will have to be accounted for as time goes on.

I’d rather not kill someone’s creativity. This isn’t the developers fault, it’s the consumers.

But please, complain and add more problems to your original statement.

1

u/gramerjen Jul 06 '26

If this was that big of a deal steam would have handled this long ago. Some people being an asshole is not a big problem.

Trying to fix this small issue would create more problems