No i think it's a great policy. If the game doesn't grab you in an hour and a half, then save your money for something that does.

I think that's fine and honestly ethical. There used to be a time where every game would have a demo for you to try out. Now often times you have to commit to the purchase or risk ruining the experience for yourself by watching YouTube gameplay videos.

If game developers still gave out demos this wouldnt be a problem

I wish all games had a demo version. Specially the big AAA titles, these studios can easily churn out a demo.

I really commend outfits like Laminar. They make the X-Plane12 flight sim

You can download a demo that is fully functional for 15 minutes. After 15 mins your controls are disabled.

But you can restart the demo as many times as you want. Theres no limit.

This lets you play around with the settings to see if your PC can handle it before you drop $.

Wish more game studios did stuff like this.

It's a good policy and makes people confident to purchase to test to see if a game will work with their software. I've used it maybe 10 times out of about 800 games. I'd buy less if it wa not an option. Callisto Protocol was the most recent I remember, looked great and bought on day one only to find the variation in frame rates so wild it was unplayable.

Lol go look at youtube. There's challenge videos to see if people can beat the game and still get the steam refund. Good times.

>I love Valve for creating an amazing refund system

They only created a refund system because of a court order, and they just matched it to the worst one offered by a competitor (Origin) at the time. And they only refund to your Steam Wallet regardless of purchase method. I'm happy it's there and I've used it a few times, but Valve absolutely does not on any level deserved to be praised over it.

After awhile though, it's probably not a good idea to really keep doing this. I hear that eventually, Valve may see this as some sort of abuse. As to what they'll do about it? Probably not honor the refund.

The refund policy is not a system where you just try games and refund them later. There's so many ways to find out about games and learn of them to gauge interest. This is not one of them.

I don't know why you'd criticize this lol

It's a good policy and they have great customer service, you are using it as it's written.

If a game doesn't have a demo, I will use valve's return policy as a demo trial. More often than not I keep the game, but it's also a nice way to return things that aren't deck verified yet and then you find out they don't work on the deck.

I honestly wish it were longer. I remember trying to get into the DayZ standalone game last year with my dad, between difficulties with finding servers, eventually resolving to hosting our own, QoL features (teleporting, custom loot tables, mods, console commands, etc.) being exponentially harder to access than the sold ARMA 2 mod we eventually decided to just give up on that (garbage) game and return to the mod. That took us 5 hours over several days due to our schedules though, but we probably didn’t even spend more than 30 minutes actually in the game, most of it was spent in lobbies, server menus, changing controls, and other such things.

Granted that’s not a particularly common case, but it does exist for games that have terrible or convoluted means of setup for multiplayer.

"Rinse repeat almost a dozen times"... Yeeeeah, that's more because there's a lot of unworthy, shitty games these days. Many who have great marketing, trailer or screenshots and make you think you're gonna get something great, but then hands on you're like holy shit... and then uninstall. So to me, that's not a problem with Steam. Devs need to make good products that both hold up under scrutiny and actually deliver on their promises.

I tend to agree with most of the posts here. If companies still did demos like they used to, you wouldn't need a refund policy. You weren't able to refund a game back to a store if it was opened unless the disc was defective and even then it was a crapshoot on whether it would be accepted back or not.

The one poster is also right about there being a lot of unworthy crappy games. You didn't have that issue when materials had to be purchased: packaging, discs etc. With digital, anything can show up and early access is just...ugh, to me early access seems like nothing more than the old Steam Greenlight garbage. Nothing's guaranteed to be finished in that state and any ones I've seen seem to be more like beta access than early access.

I think over the years I've only refunded about 3 games and I knew in 5 minutes they weren't for me so I think 2 hours is good limit especially if you are playing and unsure about it. I'm probably also a bit on the boring side, I don't really look at games that I don't normally play so that's probably also why my count is so much lower. If I were more adventurous and willing to try games outside my comfort zone, I imagine I'd probably do the same as you.

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It's a fantastic policy. When I start a new game, I also start a 1:45:00 timer. So much better than it used to be! My library is full of crap I've almost not played because the refund policy didn't exist.

Caveat: if you FINISH a game in less than 2 hours and get a refund, you're a trash person

I only buy games I like, but I like the peace of mind that if a game is complete shit, I'm not risking my money. I have never applied for a refund.