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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

Nearly all of my "unplayed" Steam games have been played plenty by me, just not through Steam. Sometimes I think about how my Steam account contributes to statistics that are used to drive narratives like this where "not time-tracked by Steam" = "unplayed game bought by an insane collector." But chances are that narrative is overwhelmingly right most of the time, so whatever.

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Just to clarify, I have the same usage and it's because I "pirate" games and only buy the ones that I play more than once/couple hours.

I don't trust and nor like the refund policies/processes and all kinds of fences they implement, and often even after I have bought a game I will keep using the pirated version because it is more convenient (offline play, no need to login and it's already installed... when games are 100-150GB sometimes it's a waste of time to reinstall using Steam). Do you have another kind of usage that leads to these false positive?

> Do you have another kind of usage that leads to these false positive?

No, pretty much same usage. I buy games to support the devs after I've already pirated the game and determined it's good, then I go back to playing the pirated copy.

Steam’s return policy is pretty generous. But I can see not wanting to deal with it anyway.

> I don't trust and nor like the refund policies/processes and all kinds of fences they implement

Steam is pretty reasonable. If you bought a game in the past 14 days and played fewer than 2 hours, you can get a refund for any reason. You need only go to your recent purchases, “report a problem”, and with a couple of clicks you’re done.

If works incredibly well and with no hassle, I have done it a number of times for games which ran like crap on my machine or plain weren’t fun.

I’ve heard GOG is even better with their returns, though I have never tried it. And they sell games which are DRM-free, so even better than a pirated version.

One exception: sometimes it counts the launcher running (and downloading more stuff), but it's rare for some games, mostly MMOs. So I have personally seen how people did not manage to log in before the 2h were up.

One admittedly rather niche example of buying games through Steam only to play them* outside of Steam is where you download data to use it in some open-source remake that relies on the original assets. OpenMW/Morrowind is the main one that comes to mind for me - I have sunk dozens if not hundreds of hours into OpenMW but needed to download the Morrowind assets from Steam to do so (after I lost my original game CD). There are a few other examples of such games out there, like CorsixTH/Theme Hospital (actually not available on Steam I believe, but available from GOG so same principle).

Steam's refund policy is awesome. You can play any game for up to 2 hours and refund for no reason. When no man's sky came out I bought it, played it for like 15 minutes, refunded it. The next day I thought I'd give it another shot so I bought it again, played for a little while and refunded again.

I have refunded a bunch of games, never had any problem with it. As long as you haven't played more than 2 hours they refund no questions asked.

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