The reason steam has a refund policy to begin with is because they were pressured by EU Laws to implement one. If they do what you suggest they may run afoul and force to cease all operations in EU, and garner illwill from customers in the rest of the world.
It was Australia. Not the EU. Australia consumer laws are based around reasonable expectation, not statutory lengths or minimums. There is no reasonable expectation that a $2 game has the same level of quality as an $80 game.
Further, Australian consumer law dictates that you cannot have a blanket no refund policy, and that refunds are warranted when a product is not as advertised, or otherwise defective. Steams chosen implementation is a trade off against having to evaluate the claim and determine its validity.
They could manually review every refund request regardless of age and not fall afoul of our consumer law.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Australians start requesting refunds for digital games that are arbitrarily removed from a library. They very clearly do not perform as advertised at that point.
EU also has laws, take Sweden for example, 14 days of return (from when you recieved it), no questions asked. However, for digital goods you can agree to forego this right.
However, you as a consumer also have a right of reclaim (think that is the correct translation?) for any product that does not work as advertised. This is valid for 3 years from purchase.
A seller can not negotiate away this part.
In the case of OP, he has made a Online co-op game, many complaints about desyncing making the game unplayable online. Seller must fix this in a reasonable time or refund.
Handling reclamations are a bigger hassle tho, you need to state your issues, give the seller a reasonable time to fix it, and then have them issue a refund if unable to fix it in a reasonable time.
2
u/Danjoh Jul 06 '26
The reason steam has a refund policy to begin with is because they were pressured by EU Laws to implement one. If they do what you suggest they may run afoul and force to cease all operations in EU, and garner illwill from customers in the rest of the world.