maninahat said:
Finally, I get to comment on the issue after being stuck without posting rights! (FYI: you can't post on the forums from parts of India).
Why are people being so absolutist about this? It is possible to be simultaneously pleased that Steam now offers a better refund service, but also critical of the fact that this new service provides fairly obvious opportunities for abuse. There is no reason why the policy can't be adjusted to remove the anti-indie dev elements whilst retaining the good bits for consumers.
Also, I don't think the argument "indie devs should just make good games if they don't want refunds!" holds any water for several reasons:
a) How many people get a book or a DVD refunded just because they didn't like the story? As I see it, it is the store's responsibility to refund faulty goods, or goods with technical flaws. If your DVD won't play or the picture is faulty, of course it is sensible to get a replacement. Likewise if a game has been released on steam has been hastily thrown together, constantly crashes to desktop and is rife with bugs, it makes sense to get that refunded. It does not make sense to refund a DVD because you were disappointed with the ending to Dark Knight Rises, or if you thought Dear Esther was boring. The criteria for a game being "good" goes beyond the technical, objective aspects (like whether it literally works) and often includes a highly subjective judgement of a game's story, characters, gameplay, aesthetics etc. Having a no-questions-asked approach totally permits these spurious refund demands, and that seems a bit daft to me.
Not liking a game's gameplay, story or whatever else tends to be noticed pretty fast (probably why they went with such a short timeframe for return), and that seems a very valid reason for returning the product. Much like physical products, not being satisfied with it shortly after purchase has always been a valid reason for return, be it a couch that was lumpy when gotten home, a dresser that was the wrong size, or whatever else.
Also worth noting that unlike actual physical products, digital products have absolutely no overhead cost. There is no cost for physical storage or sending back bad merchandise. Thus a no questions asked refund for 2 hours of gameplay does not seem wrong to me. There is literally nothing lost for trying a game out now (increasing overall sales as more people try it) and nothing lost when the sale is returned (as there is no lost cost in the return practice unlike physical stores). Thus this is actually good for devs that make good products.
While it may potentially increase "spurious" refund demands, I have to ask, so what? Gamers now have an extra 2 hours to decide if the product they want is actually what they saw in the advertisement before they are unable to get their money back? Hell, I've had to make longer drives home from a store to check to see if the product I bough was actually what I needed. The only games threatened by this are ones so short as to not last 2 hours and so poor of quality that their creators can't trust them to satisfy the people who bought them to not return them after finding out for themselves just how bad they are.
People are lazy, if they already bought something, and the money is already gone from pocket, most aren't going to bother dealing with the steam refund BS if the game was satisfactory to what they payed for it. It is the same reason why shitty shovelware for the consoles managed to make money despite many physical stores actually having far more lenient return policies then steam's.
The argument here seems to be that in purchasing the game, the customer should be screwed into whatever the mystery purchase actually is if the game is short. That doesn't seem right to me. Hell, that would actually make me spend my money on games that are longer just because of the refund policy applying to them, since the loophole of making a shorter game not having the policy apply seems rife for abuse by the unscrupulous. And lets not forget, those sorts of devs are the reason the new policy exists in the first place, but more on that in a bit.
b) No, you shouldn't complain about a game being less than 2 hours long. If someone is asking for $3 for a one hour experience, that's still a decent deal. It is ridiculous to expect a small fry indie dev to shove in a bunch more padding or content just to insure people have to play for more than two hours - the very nature of an indie dev is that their projects are small scale and done on a shoestring. Some games are honestly better being short. Some really good games need only be five minutes long to get the point across.
You are right, some games don't need a lot of time to get their point across. And they should be willing to bank on the quality of their product being able to supply that point in a way that the customer still feels they got their money's worth. If they can't, if they are honestly worried their game is so short and so poorly done that people would abuse the refund system, then that speaks far more about their trust in their product then anything else.
The issue isn't one of expecting an indie dev to pad the game, the issue is expecting the indie dev to put forth a product deserving the money spent on it. If they want to go short and cheap, that is fine, many games have that are worth the price. But I've come to the conclusion that something is very wrong with the idea of using the low quality of the product they are providing as an excuse to cut into consumer's ability to make returns. If I sell a product, I should do so under the impression that people actually want to buy it and that it is deserving of that payment. That applies if it is a big product or a small product. Your idea seems to work on the basis that indie devs are entitled to the pay without putting the quality simply because they choose to make something shorter. I don't like that implication, it is honestly rife with abuse potential, and considering the reason this change happened was because steam was getting cluttered with shovelware garbage in the first place, I think the devs were the ones abusing the system. The old system was one where devs had the ability to enact return policies and we all saw how well that worked giving them the keys to that henhouse. Many didn't make any such policy, and some openly abused the lack of one.
Also worth noting that some indie devs have openly stated they would intentionally try to game the new system with such tricks as putting a 2 hour cutscene before the gameplay. Serious or not, the fact they would openly admit to such dishonest tactics to avoid giving people refunds for not liking the game is not convincing me that they deserve special exception. It actually does the opposite.
c) Even if the game is excellent, a dev should still quite reasonably be concerned with people treating the refund system as a free rental service. If you don't think some gamers would be cheap and unscrupulous enough to try and recoup a couple of dollars for a game they loved, you clearly have never heard of internet piracy; the thing which primarily exists so as to allow gamers to avoid spending any money on a game, no matter how good it is.
If you think users would risk steam bans and failed refunds when it is far simpler and easier to pirate itself, then you could do with a reminder. As others have covered before, people pirate already, why the hell would they start risking their own money in a system without guarantee of money back for a 2 hour trial period on a game that is so damn small and short when they can just get the full thing for free pirating it and not have to deal with any of that noise?
Also worth noting that piracy has existed for years and yet it hasn't killed off any games yet, probably because people who pirate never were actually potential customers. Those that buy the game and refund it if they don't like it, they actually are such customers. Physical stores had to deal with the same issue with games considering their far more customer friendly policies on refunds, I think indie devs who weren't already trying to abuse the system will be fine.
d) "But what about the lack of demos? How am I supposed to know if a game is good?" If this was 1997, a game not having a demo would be a big issue if I wanted know if it was any good. In 2015 however, I can take ten seconds on google to find a hundred reviews, or I could watch the entire game played on a lets play video, or I could generally find anything I could possibly want to know about the game through forum discussion. If your "demo" of a game requires you to play an the entire game all the way through, only then for you to decide you didn't like and use the refund system, you are being a dick. It's like eating an entire dessert in a restaurant, only to then stick your fingers down your throat and vomit it back onto the plate, just so you can demand it be taken off the bill. As far as I'm concerned, you consumed the entire product already; you've defeated the point of a demo.
Except, yet again, pirating it cheaper, easier, has no risk of financial loss and has fewer hoops to jump through. Thus it is pretty damn rare that someone is going to look at this system and go "forget just pirating the thing through a 5 second google search, I'm going to risk money and account by abusing steam".
While your stance is noted, you are fighting shadows on this one. Digital media have been screwed with regard to consumer rights or ability for refund for a long time now, but that doesn't make it right. Physical stores would take back games just fine, after far longer periods then 2 hours of gameplay. Yes those that abuse the system would be dicks, the problem is that there is a free, easier and less risky system ripe for abuse already, why the hell would anyone start to abuse this new one for a bunch of short shitty little indie games? And yes, I use "shitty" here as if the concern is so great for those games that people who are already willingly paying for them will refund them after they are beater, than that is an issue of their quality or lack there of.
I've played some short games, and even among them I can think of at least one that provided the option to refund it after beating, I wouldn't dream of doing so because it was actually damn well worth the cost of admission despite being short. I know I am not the only one who would admit that about short games either. Listening to the whines of shovelware slingers who've been abusing the current refund-less system for a while now in the first place really can't make me think this change is anything but a good thing overall. It cuts off one more avenue for the unscrupulous to fleece the consumers, it actively helps good devs by making people more willing to try out and take chances with smaller games, and it makes shovelware far less likely to be profitable.
