Topic: Steam now offers refunds

[idolminds]

Finally.

You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.

It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within fourteen days of purchase, and the title has been played for less than two hours. There are more details below, but even if you fall outside of the refund rules we’ve described, you can ask for a refund anyway and we’ll take a look.

You will be issued a full refund of your purchase within a week of approval. You will receive the refund in Steam Wallet funds or through the same payment method you used to make the purchase. If, for any reason, Steam is unable to issue a refund via your initial payment method, your Steam Wallet will be credited the full amount. (Some payment methods available through Steam in your country may not support refunding a purchase back to the original payment method. Click here for a full list.)

[idolminds]

I found this post pretty interesting, musing about what the new refund policy could lead to.

Steam claims that they reserve the right to restrict a user’s refund privileges if they are abusing the system, but quickly follows up by saying that refunding a game just to re-buy it on sale is not an abuse.  I’m sure they mention this because they have a non-stop stream of support tickets complaining about buying something the day before a sale.  This explicitly-stated-non-abuse is going to reduce Steam’s customer support burden.  That looks good from Steam’s perspective.  How does it look for you, the developer?  Your Steam sale now applies retroactively to the last 14 days of regular sales without any of the actual benefits of being on sale during those 14 days.

[idolminds]

PuppyGames has another interesting perspective.