Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw101010 | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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).

> 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.

> 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 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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com