Steam’s 2-hour refund policy has been not good for indie game sales.
I am fairly certain that indie games would sell half as many copies without the refund policy, which would be worse than a 10% refund rate. Hell, I don’t think I have ever refunded a game through steam even when I didn’t enjoy a game but I have bought a lot of games only because the option was available.
The article gives no examples of which games are suffering from this policy and doesn’t listen the overall rate of returns on larger titles. It also doesn’t give examples of games where people are abusing the return policy after 100% games.
This sounds like a lot of speculation.
Yeah feels like the complaint is when given the chance to try out something 10% don’t like it.
I’ll bet more than that don’t like it, but don’t bother with the refunds.
Yeah could be just speculation. I mean I am sure that some people are abusing the return policy but I am not sure if it is enough to hurt indie game. I agree more data would help.
The images of that article are close to disinformation in my eyes.
In the header I only recognize the right picture and it’s Slay The Spire, a game famous for taking hundreds of hours of your time. In the article itself they have pictures of Hollow Knight & Hades. Both games which takes a lot of time to finish. So again not what the article itself is about. Only thing that fits is that they are indie games.
You can even swipe on the Hollow Knight image to see screenshots from other short indie victims such as Stardew Valley and Minecraft.
Not having a 2 hour refund policy will be not good for ALL sales…
I guess the question is…how many of those 10% refunded are doing so for nonlegit reasons? and is it enough to justify changing the policy? how could we find that out?
There is probably a lot of bad games and shovelware short games so it is hard to say.
yeah i wonder if the numbers are different when looking at rating and overall downloads. or are there people out there on like reddit admitting to buying and returning games they’ve finished? in enough numbers that justify making returns more complicated?
I can definitely believe it, but i guess i’d want more data before supporting more complicated returns. like, if it’s hurting indies genuinely, then yeah make the changes.
Pretty much the only games I’d consider refunding are the ones that either straight-up don’t work or were very different from what I expected (which would usually mean that the marketing was misleading).
Looking through the article for any evidence that this is true:
On average, most indie game releases have around 10%-12% of their sales refunded
Did they compare to average or explain where that number came from or anything? No! And even with their random magic number it matches pretty well with this approximated average (~10%) for all steam games. And another stat of interest from that article:
games costing <$5 only having an 8% refund rate, and those costing $30+ having an 11.9% refund rate.
I think XDA sum up their thesis best as:
Theoretically, someone can buy an indie game and play through it to the end in less than 2 hours, getting any and all Steam achievements associated with it, and then refund the full game.
All theory, complete bullshit speculation. No examples of any game that fits into this category, no hard data, hell not even a single anecdotal quote from some shovelware developer.
What a garbage article, garbage “journalism” and garbage speculation.
It’s bad for shovelware not “indie games”.
It’s not good enough for 90% of any kind of game, IMO.
Most of the games I’ve been checking out recently, the god damn tutorial is longer than 2 fucking hours.
It’s not to determine if the game is something you would like; it’s to determine if the game actually works on your machine.
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