> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. why wouldn't they just pirate the game, something that is absolutely trivial to do? It's not really coherent to say a huge swath of gamers are manipulative enough to refund, have no moral compunction about doing so, but are too technically stupid to pull it off.įinally, think about this from Valve's side - if a huge % of <2 hour games were being refunded, why wouldn't Valve adopt the apparently easy proposal of allowing short game developers to set a flag that alters their refund %age? Doesn't Valve's choice not to do this suggest that they don't really view it as a common thing? One thing to consider about this entire claim: if someone intends to proxy-pirate the video game by buying it, playing it, refunding, and cackling off into the sunset. Gamediscover has also had a number of developers share refund data directly for this article and other articles, including developers of short games (some as short as 20 minutes long), and none have had anything in the ballpark of the studios who have made press cause celebre pushes claiming incredibly high refund rates. So for there to be systematic refund abuse, it needs to be people who play the game to completion, then refund the game, but don't leave a review: but this pattern is not seen in any other games where developers report far lower refund rates. Basically, it's possible to tell if someone who reviews the game refunded the game or not. it doesn't positively prove that there's no refund abuse, but it makes refund abuse incredibly unlikely. Here's an in-depth investigation of this claim that finds absolutely no evidence to support it. Probably the most famous overtly fraudulent example seems to be 'Summer of '58', a game developed by a Russian developer who claimed 30-50% of their players refunded. And there's not really any incentive to add filler content, because adding filler content takes real development time, driving up the budget. Meanwhile, there are enormous numbers of success stories amongst short games. In most of the cases I've seen developers complain there's been no evidence of refunds, but the games have sold poorly to begin with, and the attention from complaining in public about how mean all the refunders are seems to be a marketing technique more than anything.

A number of developers have complained about refunds, but when looking into any of their actual cases, you see no real evidence of refund abuse, normal 2-5% refund rates, etc.

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