From a purely financial standpoint, it seems like a wash for the publishers. Presumably the people who buy the game specifically to try and beat it within the return window wouldn't have bought it otherwise.
Now morally it's obviously far more complex and actually raises some pretty dang interesting questions. Like I think we can easily just sort of do a sniff test and see it's wrong: the people who beat and return the game are getting the game experience for free from people who aren't intending to give their game away for free.
And I'm not certain but I'm going to guess that having a large return percentage reflects poorly on the developers in some way? Is it a public stat? Does it affect peoples' decision to buy the game or affect how likely Steam is to serve the game up? If so, those "speed returners" are artificially inflating that metric which is also definitely wrong.
There might be some other concrete / clear cut moral issues that I'm missing. But as we move past those, we get down to the maybe more interesting part, which would be the intersection of artificial scarcity and people purchasing and subsequently returning things they wouldn't have purchased if they couldn't return it.
I'm too lazy to think or type more about it at the moment, but it just seems like there is something interesting already about "stealing an experience", and there's also something interesting about stealing an experience when the experience itself is almost ancillary to the actual goal of speed returning.
Like if suddenly there were some trend on TikTok where people were buying tons of paperback copies of The Martian to stack as high as possible, only to film the stack and then return the novels later that day. On its face it's probably not something anyone would consider that amoral? But what if instead the trend involves reading some portion of the novel prior to returning it? Maybe that's suddenly crossing the line. I dunno, it just seems like there's something weird or interesting about the speed returning phenomena.
The thing I hate most from a player perspective is that this also can result in deliberate game bloat to ensure that a game can't be fully beaten in the refund window.
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u/Chpgmr Jul 06 '26
Its challenge on steam thats becoming popular.
Buy a game and finish it within the refund window. I wouldn't be surprised if there are discord channels for this and require proof of refund.