How To Get Around Steam's Terrible Two-Hour Refund Policy As A Small Game Developer

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[PolyMars]

personally I choose to extend gameplay by locking my game to 4 FPS

[DevDuck]

Let's just slap all of our games together and pretend it's the next WarioWare. I wonder if anyone's ever done a game jam like that...

[alfredmakes]

Add a "New Game+" button that unlocks after you complete the game but is actually just the New Game button.

[boxmanatee]

Simple solution: add a character creator.

[Cyranek]

add a feature length movie into your game

[anqzavok]

pirating somehow feel less morally wrong than refunding after beating the game.

[zaidlacksalastname]

The next level of piracy: Speedrun hollow knight under 2 hours and refund it.

[jimbob]

Just want to point out that like what has happened with DRM in the past, any any method you employ to curb the people who are refunding the game after completing it will also affect the people who won't refund a game just because they can. This can impact your good will with consumers who may feel like they're being punished for other people's behaviour.

[JohnEdwa]

Refunding a short game after beating it is scummy, but also something I believe most genuine players wouldn't do. If it wasn't possible, the people who do it wouldn't have bought the game in the first place.

[thoughtguardian]

Some of my favorite games are short little bite sized ones. It would be a shame to see these vanish.

[His-Games]

People say to just "extend your game", but adding content can be so much hard work for the developer, having to design, create assets, polish, playtest and balance, all of this taking more time and therefore budget. Making games are hard, people.

[LanaLuxGames]

I prefer shorter games. I don't have a lot of time to play a game, so it's nice when I can get an immersive experience instead of watching a movie or something. It's such a shame that us devs get penalized when we want to take this approach.

[Jabrils]

I wonder, what, if anything, will allow more indies voices to be heard on Steam.

[deadinside]

Wouldn’t exploiting people right back encourage people to further exploit you since your giving them a justifiable reason to hate you?

How does the saying go? “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

[Erbmon]

So, you go to a race in flip-flops and every body tells you it's stupid, you then lose the race and bitch about how the rules should account for flip-flops.They tell you there is a flip-flop race down the road and you respond that this one is much more popular. This is not their first short horror game in steam, what do they need to do for you to hold them accountable for their own choices?

[roinois]

I wonder if Steam could implement a way for devs to request a shorter return window but then have that lead to a big warning on the steam page "Warning: unlike most games on steam, this game cannot be refunded after 30 minutes of playtime". They would need some sort of gate whether its revenue or manual review so not every game would even be eligible for a reduced refund window. It really doesn't make sense for games like RDR2 which take hours just to get to the meat of the game to have the same refund window as small indie games.

[OliverBeebe]

i think it could work if steam made the refund time window relative to the price of the game. $60 gets you the full 2 hours, while stuff under $5 could have 30 minutes.

[Overposting]

_90 minutes game_
that guy: "not a quality product, i wont pay for it"
_90 minutes game + flappy bird_
that guy: "WTF TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY!!!"

[isaacsmith]

Malicious compliance doesn't work in a consumer driven market with tons of other content. While I agree that Steam's policy is unfair, reacting in this way will just drive consumers to other content and hurt you rather than the platform.

[justletmelistthese]

These would only make people refund without playing the game and then complaining. Least effort possible is bundling multiple games into a quasi launcher.