Steam refund policy already being abused by PC gamers, according to devs
It hasn't even been a week, and already developers are reporting PC gamers are abusing Steam's new refund policy.
It’s been less than a week since Valve announced its new refund policy, and already we’re hearing reports of abuse straight from developers.
Developer Qwiboo revealed it has felt the negative impact of Steam Refunds with its game, Beyond Gravity. The game is a procedurally-generated platformer where you guide your astronaut to new planets by jumping between them, collecting as many pickups as you can. The game has been sitting at the $1.99 price for several months and has received a Steam user rating of Very Positive, although Qwiboo has shown how its short game has suffered from the new Steam Refunds policy by tweeting out a sales graph showing its decline.
Along with the sales graph image, Qwiboo says, “Out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That's 72% of purchases. Rate of refunds before was minimal.”
Abuse of Steam’s new refund policy many PC developers were concerned with. In fact, it was one of the subject’s we touched upon during our most recent Chattycast episode. While the new Steam refund policy benefits its customers, it would appear indie developers who create short experiences will be feeling the sting of abuse the most unless Valve does something to change its policy for their benefit. Until then, we don’t see the abuse of buying a small, indie game and playing it for under an hour to then asking for a refund to stop any time soon.
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replyDaniel Perez posted a new article, Steam refund policy already being abused by PC gamers, according to devs
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Probably worth going and reading some reviews of the game too. Not so sure this is "abuse."
http://store.steampowered.com/app/317510/
I don't know how to feel about this. Certainly there are a lot of mobile type games out there which will sell at a very low price point for not much of a game. I bet most people want to refund most of their mobile games.
On the one hand it seems like they are eliminating one economic model, on the other it seems like they are setting a standard for quality being at least 2+ hours of entertainment to be on the Steam store.
It will be interesting.-
It's kind of strange to see so many negative recommendations when the game averages a "Very Good" positive rating on Steam.
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I'm not sure how that rating system works but it really seems to skew in favor of the game. If you check out some of the most poorly rated games on Steam they might say "Mixed" at worst. I've seen several games with very few recommends and lots of bad reviews and they'll say "Mostly Positive".
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I read something about this on Reddit. People were claiming they just had a sale during that time which ended right as that drop in sales started. I never found any confirming data, but if that's the case, it's a lot stronger argument for that sudden rise and decline.
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That's a good point. I'll reach out to the developer to see if they can confirm if the game was part of sale when it was selling well. That definitely could explain why the sudden drop in sales.
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Easy to check, sale ended May 31st: http://isthereanydeal.com/#/page:game/price?plain=beyondgravity
That doesn't mean that people still aren't getting refunds though.-
The chart for Puppy Games (Titans Attack and such ) shows about a months worth of data, and a very pronounced drop.
https://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/607376136935325696
http://www.puppygames.net/
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^Iawtp
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Steam impressions say "Very Positive".
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Also:
551 positive
65 negative
That's an 89% positive perception of this game. I don't think this is a bad game.
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Do you really think it's going to be limited to bad games?
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Doom shareware could have passed as a full game by todays standards. You will never see that again.
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Arguably some Free to Play models are the new version of this, at least the ones without ridiculous levels of microtransactions. Unfortunately too many companies abuse that business model.
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Instead of a game being non-refundable after a standard two hours or whatever they decided on, games should become non refundable after a promised minimum playtime shown in big letters on the store page.
That way, devs of short "experience" titles like Gone Home or The Stanley Parable don't get stiffed, while purchasers can get early warning if the store page only promises thirty minutes on a supposed MMORPG-survival-crafting game.-
I think this is the best solution. Some games are just short games, or artistic set pieces. Dear Esther springs to mind.
It also has a built in counter to developers listing unrealistically short playtimes for their games. I know I'm not going to buy some random FPS when it lists the average completion time as a half hour.
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dunno how that's a problem. If the minimum is meant to be something that's not worth quibbling over and a game is priced under that, it's not worth quibbling over
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There are limitations on the refund process such as it has to be within a specific timeframe of 2hours played time or 2 weeks which ever comes first. The problem here is that people buying the game aren't enjoying it once they played it. I have hard time believing that people are that coordinated enough to get 70% of the users to just refund the game.
I wonder if this game even had a demo or a decent enough trailer to explain what the game was to the people buying it. If your seeing 70% drop off or that high refund rate then there is probably something else wrong and its not the user.
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