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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process.

In general their policy very good, but it's not quite no questions asked—they're pretty strict about the 2 hour playtime limit, which is quite a short time to decide if a game will actually be fun. In many types of games by the time you get through the tutorial and have access to all the game mechanics you're already past the two hour mark, and they also can't tell the difference between actual play time and time in the menu while you're doing something else.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad policy, there are obviously reasons for this. But it's not truly no questions asked.

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IIRC, the refund window used to be longer, but was abused.

It still is abused for short indie games, with people buying them with the intention of speed-running through and refunding.

The refund policy is intended more for “crashed repeatedly”, “far too slow despite my machine matching the stated specs”, and “simply wouldn't run”, type problems, rather than not liking the game. There isn't much a service like Steam can do about that, that won't be abused, other than offer demos (enough for you to try out those core mechanics) which is really down to the game creators and out of their power. Other than that you just have to not be first in line, and wait for reviews from sources you trust.

Right, I get that. I've added a note to my comment above clarifying that I'm not critiquing the policy, just trying to clarify that "no questions asked" isn't a good characterization of it. It's a very good return policy for the industry and medium Steam operates in, but it has hard limits that are worth being aware of.

I wish more devs offered shareware/demo releases. Not doing so was unthinkable in the hardware hell of the 90s.

Too much shovelware on Steam these days, and the user has to pay retail price to even try it.

The frequency of the returns probably plays a part. Anecdotally, I've returned a couple of games over the 2h limit and they have refunded, no questions asked.

My only experience with hitting the limit was also the only time I've ever tried to return a game. I'm sure it mostly depends on the service rep handling your claim and how many bogus returns they've seen so far that day.

Was that 2 hours since purchase, or 2 hours play time?

The current limits are 14 days since-purchase as long as you've played the game for less than 2 hours.

Hours played. Can’t remember the purchase timeframe. Could of been the difference.

It is quite literally no questions asked. It isn’t meant to be a demo system which is what you seem to want.

No, there's a single question asked: how long have you had the game open on your computer?

Costco has a no-questions-asked return policy, and demo-ing your purchase is absolutely part of the expectation for how people will use said policy. Steam even explicitly includes "it wasn't fun" as a valid return option, as long as you reached that conclusion quickly enough.

To be clear, I'm not saying the policy is wrong, it's clearly designed to prevent abuse, I'm just saying that it's not no-questions-asked.

Yeah I always considered something used to make sure the game will run correctly on my system and I feel like 2 hours is generous enough for that use case. I suppose it doesn't preclude game breaking bugs later in the experience but nothing is perfect.

Valve is there to facilitate the sale of the game, not guarantee the game is good.

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