Refund Policy Clarification needed

that's really good point u pointed out there xD
steam family sharing eh xD

1. I'm really not sure, but if people take advantage of the situation expect Steam will put a 7days lock as well on the card you drop...
2. It clocks on your brother account. So if your account shows 0h but your bro's account shows 10h i'm pretty sure they won't give you a refund.

(don't quote me on this though)

I refunded a few games, they were around the 2 hour mark or a little bit over it. It has to be 2 hours within a 6 month period. As for the cards you should be ok to sell them, but don't do that all the time they'll catch on to what you're doing.

http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

^What truenorth said. If you do it a lot they can revoke your refund privilege.

For your first point, I think steam can restrict the card drops to after 2 hours of playing so no one can abuse the card drops.

Yes, you can get card drops, refund, then sell your cards, and yes, you can play games on another account (or in offline mode) without time showing up. However, if you decide you're going to start refunding every game you buy in two weeks after farming the cards and beating it in offline mode/family sharing, Valve is going to notice and deny any further refunds. Abuse of the privilege will get that privilege revoked, so I wouldn't try testing it.

What happens to games that come with cd keys like the ea ones, or the mmo's? haha

Yes you can exploit the system but keep in mind that they can easily take away your right to use said system. Do you really wanna risk not getting any more refunds just to get 20 cents off some cards?

keep in mind, that those "free cards" as in all other cases with free games+cards, are no loss for steam or the publisher, at least they get their few cents this way ;-)

Can i get refund for Bad rats? lol

Also this is a follow up to my post :P

View attached image.

Yes, you can do it. But do that two times and that's going to be all you'll refund on steam I guess. Unless you do it like once in a year - everybody can mess up and buy some game, play it for over a hour hoping he'll like it and then decide he surrenders and it's shit, I would say.

Refunds are already becoming a pain for smaller indies.

It's not about making better games, like your shitty poll implies, but about shitty users abusing the policy. If Valve can't work out the kinks in the system real soon to prevent abuse, then this is another fiasco that will have to be taken offline.

View attached image.

This is hurting developers.

Yeah just what the gaming market needed.... sigh

then again could also e motivating to churn out better games

So people won't refund

Oh, this is definitely going to screw many people over. Too many people out there are making it so blatantly obvious that they just don't give a shit and, in a way, they feel entitled to the cash they get for their unity-pack shitfests.

Digital Homicide. Perfect recent example.

I have a feeling this whole refund policy will affect the game industry a lot more than simple micro level. Games, especially indie games, will probably be designed differently to compensate for the 2 hours period. Instead of games that start out slow, they just focus on fine tuning the first 2 hour experience. Maybe I'm over-analyzing this, but it was honestly one of my first reactions.

Jesus christ. How low do you have to be in order to contemplate this? Just pay for your fucking games.

Consumers' rights should always trump creators'. i.e. Games should be made to satisfy gamers, not devs/publishers. Any reversal leads to insanity. See: DRM to protect 'IP' (a form of creators' rights) shafting legitimate customers. See: devs selling shitty Unity asset copypastes or bandwagon garbage (having creators' rights protection to do so) on unsuspecting buyers. See: School unions, where teachers enjoy total job security while students recieve worse and worse education.

I won't say that refunds are universally a good thing. People will abuse the system. Smaller devs who make short but sweet games will feel the pain. But on the whole there's far more good to be had from this than bad. This is exactly the self-curating system Steam needed ever since Valve opened up the floodgates. This is a good step forwards to reinstating the universal demo culture we had 10 years ago.

"Muh sales figures." The Phil Fish types might cry. Fuck 'em. If they want to sell their games they can do so off Steam if they think Steam doesn't benefit them. If their experiences are so tiny as to fall under a 2 hr time limit, they probably shouldn't be selling them in the first place. Yes, game length certainly does matter. I mean, the demo for the original Far Cry took me more than 2 hours. And merited multiple playthroughs. And was a better shooter in two hours than many modern blockbusters (which incidently take, what 7-8 these days?). It got me to buy the full game near launch. If a game is providing signficiantly less entertainment per hour-dollar than that, I'm not interested. Refunds will force devs to push that (fun / [time * money]) ratio, improving standards. Which desperately need lifting after the last and current generations.

And there are plenty of talented people using their craft to create worhtwhile interactive experiences free of charge, as full games, demos, modifications, etc. They do it for the love of the art, or to make a name for themself so that they can get to work on larger projects. A refund option will bring higher standards. I can't think of a single good game that wasn't made without heart and soul. If money is your only goal, then I have no sympathy when you don't attain it. I expect refunds to help weed out opportunistic weasels.

What if devs start padding out their games? Remember, a game that starts good may eventually get bad, but refunds won't change this. A game that's bad at the start is bad, period. I don't care if your Final Fantasy XIII takes 20 hours to get good, I'm not wasting 20 hours of my time for that. If I'm bored in the first hour, I'll get a refund. What this means is that there'll be an incentive for the opposite of padding. Devs will try to hook our attention immediately and keep it lest they lose their sale, where before they could get complacent. Yes, this means that slow burners like the first Witcher might get shafted, because games like that really do get better after a while. But they're in the minority, and word-of-mouth can spread to explain the situtation. Just like what happened with the first Witcher. Again, I expect refunds to drive an increase in standards.

Overall, to use some technical jargon, allowing refunds should depress risk aversion. Since more risk averse behaviour mathematically results in poorer outcomes than less (up to the risk neutral point), one can expect better outcomes overall from the market since refunds were introduced. What I worry is that Valve will make things worse when they try to micromanage the system. Instead of a few simple rules and allowing the market to adjust naturally within and around them, they'll likely start making exceptions, clamping down on 'abusers', adjusting the time limit and introduce additional criteria. They might introduce even more uncertainty and risk aversion that existed before they implemented this system. Valve are not known for being good at ongoing refinement (see: Greenlight, TF2).

Also, I don't think refunds will affect game discounts. Game launch prices, maybe. But not discounts. If games could be refunded/traded over more significant timeframes, oh sure. With the latter you'd get a full fledged second-hand market to take over from discounts as the economic allocation method for low time-preference consumers, much like the console games market already has. But 2 hours, being far less than most games' full playthroughs, can't really affect the diminishing demand-over-time curve that determines game prices and discounts.

This may have already been said but it's all TL;DR right now so I'mma say it anyway...

The real problem with this system comes when you get games like The Shopkeeper and The Moon Sliver (among others) where playtime from start to finish falls well under the 2-hour mark. The Moon Sliver, particularly, was of HUGE enjoyment for me, even though a full play lasted maybe an hour so I could have asked for a refund under the new arrangement, if I were unscrupulous...and many people WILL abuse the system, even if it's a matter of starting up account after account just to play "free" games...Volvo need to refine their refund terms, even if it means having a team of people who play a bunch of these smaller games to find out how long they take and adjust the refund terms accordingly. They should probably also add in a clause preventing refunds for games where cards have dropped and been sold, traded or used in crafting...

And your poll options SUCK dude

Abuse
Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.

nice nice

You can sell the cards, but when you get back home Gabe will be under your bed.

1. I am pretty sure that you are allowed to sell the card drops, but if you continuously keep requesting refunds and doing that, Valve will identify you as an abuser and block you from requesting refunds.

2. If you share the game with a friend, the friend is essentially playing your copy of the game, so it is highly likely that the time your friend played that game will be taken into consideration regarding total played time. If not, you would be using an application weakness to circumvent a rule, and that would fall into abuse, getting you blocked for requesting refunds or having your refund requests denied.

This is just speculation, please contact Steam Support for accurate answers.

So how does one ask for a refund again? I might consider refunding my pre-purchase for How to Survive: Third Person Edition. Bought it 2 days ago.