This is for a few reasons.
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They are guaranteed to see that money back at some point, since it can only be spent in the steam store
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They don't have to deal with fees from the bank either, so they don't take a loss.
I've refunded 10 games in the last month. All with good reason, but it's allowed me to find some good games, and spend more of my money on steam than I usually would. I hope this stays, since it's been pretty good so far. I got warnings on my account a year back for refunding too many games back to the card I paid for them with.
Since this has gotten some traction, there needs to be a serious penalty for developers that abuse the refund window. Early H1Z1 had an in app download that conveniently took hours to load, and logged up 3 hours of playtime. No man's sky stuffs good content into the first two hours, and peters off into nothingness after. There are gameguru achievement spam games, that give you an achievement for playing for 2 hours and 1 minute.
Do that too much and you'll lose the right to refund. I refunded a fair few games in the same month and got a warning email advising me not to refund so much, or risk losing the ability.
I've refunded 10 games in the last month. All with good reason
This sounds like bullshit.
Videos
I just had a refreshing experience with Steam that I wanted to share.
I bought two games yesterday, played one for ~ 2 hours and the other for 20 minutes, but neither was for me. I requested refunds for both, and to my surprise, they were approved quickly, with the funds set to return to my account within 24 hours.
In an age where so many companies prioritize profits over their customers, this felt fair and user-focused. It’s nice to see a platform that genuinely seems to care about its community and not just profits
So I know we recently found out steam doesn't facilitate passing deceased members accounts, but did you know 2 hours isn't for seeing if you like the game ?
I also raised a support ticket regarding this, I am not sure if I can post direct support ? but essentially I do spend a bit on games and I was asking how the metric is handled (since Jan this year I had purchased around 37 games and refunded 5 (mostly for issues like no servers in my region, not fun and one that was around the length of play)
Steam support said that based on that they said it doesn't look like I'm refunding to play but whenever you refund you must give a details response, and the only real reason they accept refunds is technical difficulties or hard to play (and things related to those things)
I sent this to my friends and most thought thats what the 2 hours were for so thought I'd share this so you know, also breaking this will basically put a lock on
I genuinely felt like this was the intended purpose, same with my friends but yea guess to many people abused the system or something
Whats your thoughts on this ?
From time to time, I see questions about refunds on Steam and it looks like some devs don't know that they can see more data on this topic - like refund reasons and notes from players.
It is hard to find, so I put together a simple instruction on how to get to this data:
login to https://partner.steampowered.com/
go to "Packages" tab,
select "all history" on the chart,
scroll down and select your game from the list,
Click "Refund data" in the "Links" section on the right,
Click "lifetime" in the "View:",
Check "Refund reasons" and notes in "view notes" per category.
I hope it will be helpful for someone. If you know about it - just ignore this post.
Have a good day!