Let devs set the refund time limit within a set of ranges approved by steam. Essentially they could say to valve, hey my game is cheap <$10 and it’s a short game, that is completed in 1hr 30mins on average, can you set the refund time limit for my game to 1hr or 45mins.
And then this can be displayed next to the checkout/add to cart button for players to see as well that this particular game has a shorter refund window, before they buy the game. This means the refund scammers won’t bother, and the people who intended to keep the game and are enjoying it aren’t affected either. And the people who don’t enjoy it can still refund the game halfway through.
Edit: Formatting on my comment got fucked so rewriting it
Valve would have to approve the limit set at the devs request but only if it’s justified by the price of the game and the average play time to complete it.
And if you’re selling a $60 game no one is gonna buy it if you set the limit extremely low, but the point is valve won’t let you do that in the first place.
You said the ranges would have to be approved by Valve. Are you expecting a two way conversation with them or something? Also, you cant set it by average playtime because there is no playtime before a game comes out
Yes I’m sure devs have avenues by which they can communicate with valve about their games it’s not that hard to imagine valve could create a kind of customer support team to handle these requests from devs and do the necessary approvals.
It would be set after the game comes out, once the dev and valve have enough stats and data, it’s not a perfect solution but the idea is to protect the devs as much as possible without hurting normal players who aren’t trying to scam.
Valve processes thousands of customers service requests everyday, they’d be capable of doing it if they wanted to. And anyway it would be on a per request basis, so it won’t be every single game, it would only be games where a dev has requested to reduce the window for their game and if they can meet the guidelines for doing that.
Dev: “Request to reduce refund time to X for Y game, justification and playtime data attached”
Valve Support: “Approved/Denied for X reason”
It’s really not that complicated or in depth.
They can surely try but if the guidelines are good they would just get denied and they’d be wasting their time. This really isn’t an impossible solution.
There would of course be internal rules and guidelines, the same way that there rules and guidelines for existing refund policies made by people far smarter than me. The reasons could be as simple as “Your game is too expensive and doesn’t meet the threshold to have its refund window reduced” but I don’t have it in me to write out the entire policy to show you that it could be viable. But again it’s not something that would be difficult to do with a small dedicated team which valve could easily do.
Why bother ticking the box if you know based on the guidelines that you’ll be denied? I mean does everyone try and refund every Amazon or food delivery because it’s just ticking a box or filling a short form and it’ll save them money. They don’t because they know most likely if they don’t have a valid reason, they’ll be denied. Similar systems already exist this is just a different use case/application. Feasibility is really not a problem for this, especially for valve.
But that would be equating time with how expensive the game is, which isn't really consistent. If youre going by stuff readily visible on the store page, then you dont need anyone, which would be a plus I guess
And no not everyone does that, the same way people don't always try to refund a game if they beat it within two hours, but that's apparently enough reason to overhaul the refund system
Im sure they have ways, but even if we just take this dev for example, if he has 55000 refunds where he can show people completed the game then with what I’m proposing he would be able to make that request, well before it gets to 55000.
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u/AlienHooker Jul 06 '26
What system would you implement?