Steam updated their refund policy last week; the policy allowed for a game to be returned for any reason, as long as you have played the game for less than two hours and owned it for two weeks or less (amongst other things).
The new policy has been effective. Tons of people are refunding games — an amount that has some developers wondering if the new policy is being abused.
Kotaku has gained information from a number of smaller independent developers, each detailing their refund rates before and after the policy change (both games with positive and mixed reviews). The developer of Beyond Gravity, a procedurally generated $1.99 game with "Very Positive" user reviews claims to have had 13 games refunded out of 18 sales in the last three days – making 72% of purchases refunded. Prior to the refund policy, the game had "minimal" refund rates.
The refund policy has developers confused, as there is no communication as to why people have requested a refund. Developers have no way of bettering the game to prevent future refunds without communication on this level.
Matt Gambell of RPG Tycoon took to the developer forums on the subject of refunds for the game. In the first seven days of June, 20 games out of 60 games purchased were returned, without a reason as to why:
"Initially, this data doesn’t really show much except the fact that people ARE almost instantaneously using this refund feature. It’s also worth mentioning that 7 of those refunds show no purchase data (which would only mean that these are claims on the game purchased towards the end of May) and the other refunds were interesting. Looking at sales data it’s not unusual for some users to purchase multiple copies of the game (I imagine for gifting to other players) however one user purchased the game 7 times and then refunded 5 of them. (Did they buy 6 copies for friends, only to find that 5 of them already had it?)
This is part of the problem. There’s no way of knowing WHY users have claimed a refund. There’s no communication with me as a developer. I have so many questions… Could it be that they were having technical issues? Is it something that could have been solved by talking to me? Did they ACTUALLY mistakenly buy 7 copies of the same game, is that even possible?"
The Octodad creator is seeing a 30% refund rate, even on games that were purchased months ago.
It's hard to say if the refunds are coming from something as devious as users purchasing the game, pirating the files and refunding it or genuinely disliking the game. Either way, with developers claiming to see refunds for game purchases over two weeks old, Steam needs to look into their policy and make sure everything is working right.
If the policy is being abused there's a chance that it may revert back to the older policy, thus ruining the refund policy for people who simply do not like the game they purchased. Don't ruin this for the rest of us.
[Kotaku / PCGamesN / Destructoid]
