Steam Refunds : How will it effect an indie?

For me jacking up the prices higher prices would just mean that I wouldn't buy random/risky stuff at all or would hit the refund button even faster than before if the game does show its best in the <2 hours.

 

Well its too early to tell how the market will react
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...ry-appreciation-for-steams-new-return-policy/

 

I think this will affect only bad devs in any reasonable way, the kind of that releases such "successes" as Infestation: Survivor Stories a.k.a. WarZ, Slaughtering grounds and so on.

Of course refund will also happen to people who release good games, but it probably won't make a difference (mostly those will be people who have too old computer to run the game or those who made their purchase under the influence of Mr. Beer).

Aiusrage, what's your game? I'd like to check it out.

 

Thats not my game it was a graph from an article. I just meant I got a bunch of refunds myself as a user.

 

Before you've edited your post, it clearly stated "I've got few refunds already" or something to that extend right under the graph.

 

I don't understand why articles around the numbers of refunds appear everywhere. How's that an interesting or relevant metric for anyone? Before refunds were practically impossible. Now they are possible. And certain developers are like: "Refunds are up 1000%!!!11". Show us your revenue or we don't care.

That graph in particular is for Project Zomboid I guess. A game I in fact have wanted to try out because it looks kind of fun, but it also looks kind of unfun. I'm not really able to tell from videos. If I buy it now and refund it I'll appear as a refund in that graph, but I wouldn't have purchased it at all before refunds were introduced so now they at least have a chance of getting me as a customer. There are so many games I'm able to try out now that I otherwise wouldn't have tried. If one of them sticks and I don't refund it then that's one extra sale for that developer. This applies to AAA games especially. I have no problem with supporting a great indie developer even if I realize their game wasn't for me, but the upfront cost for most AAA games have always been so high I've never bought any games I was unsure about.

Requesting a refund is still a process though. It would be neat if it was as easy as buying the game - just click a button and you're done. When I'm developing games in Unity I often want to look at how other games have implemented feature X. Say for instance I'm creating a third person game and I want to look at how GTA 5's camera and character controller behaves. It would be really great if I could just buy the games I wanted to look at when I needed them and refund them after with no intention of ever actually playing the game in question. Even then some games might win me over and I'll end up keeping them.

 

Yeah that was abit confusing anyway I just meant i used steam to get abunch of refunds and almost have enough to buy arkham knight with just refunds.

 

Sounds like they could get banned from refunds because that would probably be abuse. I'm also unsure how steam will monitor this. They just gave me my money back from witcher3 that I bought a while back and played 4 hours of. I was enjoying it a little, but it was meh compared to dragon's dogma, which I gave them as my reason

And it's true. I'm sure witcher fans love that game, but it was definitely wrong for me to think it could replace dragon's dogma. I hope they have another game and even a crappy pc port... it was so good.

 

I wonder how long Value will let refunds like that slide through. Obviously Valve has decided to be very flexible during the initial transition after the refund announcement. At some point, Value will need to start enforcing their own refund criteria, though.

And I wonder how loose they will keep the criteria for a refund. They gave you a refund of a game that you played for 4 hours because you did not like it as much as another game in your Steam library. By that logic, I should ask Steam to refund all of the games in my library except for Counter Strike. I won't do that, because I don't feel that is valid criteria for a refund.

Ideally, the refunds should be for criteria like severe bugs or false advertising. Crap games like "Air Control" should be handled through an automated refund process. A refund system should protect the consumer against garbage. A refund system should not need to protect the consumer from excellent games that the consumer simply did not enjoy as much as their favorite game.

 

@ShilohGames no doubt, and I 100% should not have gotten the refund. But I figured they would let me, and I was probably going to have under 20 hours of that game before the end of my natural life, so I feel that money could be better spent elsewhere. And it's in my steam wallet so that will most likely be either 1 AAA title or several indie titles

Maybe they accepted 4 hours because witcher 3 is SOOO many cutscenes that they figured my actual gameplay time was more like 20 minutes ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I mentioned that because witcher3 seemed like it could be a replacement for my favorite game, when really it was nothing like it at all. Didn't do enough research => impulse buy + didn't like it. That's 2 acceptable refund criteria

I don't plan on abusing the system though. This is not going to make me more likely to buy things just because I can return them. I like very specific things.

 

This is an interesting graph. It shows the number of sales did increase about 20% on the day the refunds were highest. Not nearly enough to actually make revenue come out ahead (assuming this data is all for one game at the same price). It also shows that "after the dust starts to settle" sales are virtually identical to what they were before yet the refunds are about 20% which means revenue has dropped to about 80% of what it was before. Of course, that is based on eye-balling the chart and assuming I am reading it correctly.

I think that seems reasonable though. A big issue I think has been the trend to do away with game demos. Tests were performed several years and in some cases sales of games dropped by 1/2 when a playable demo was offered so players could try out the game. Since that time demos are offered less and less. You can google this and find the relevant articles.

A lot of players (myself included) had libraries of these demos and the demos themselves were all we needed. The reason is because so damn many games were being made even then (and way more now) the best way to go was just to download the demos. Of course, occasionally I bought a game... maybe one out of every 10 to 20 demos I played. It was great for me as a gamer. I got a lot of game experiences for free. And there are people out there who are more extreme than I am who mainly only played the demos. A lot of players were perfectly content just playing the demos. That is also the conclusion the people doing the tests came to and why the emphasis on putting out free demos has changed so much.

So demos kind of faded away. This worked well for the developers/publishers because gamers had no real choice but to buy the games. Now that has changed and gamers have a way to try games nearly risk-free (money wise) once again. For this reason, I think we will see some increase in sales and I think we will see those refunded in many cases. How much can they do it? Can a player refund 5 games per month and it not be considered abusing the system? 10 games? 20 games? I guess only Steam knows the answer.

It will be interesting to see how it all ends up.

 

You know how refunds remove games from your account? Sounds like steam could copy&paste some of that code to introduce 'demo mode' for games where you have a temporary key to install and play a game (only with steam online as a form of DRM protection). When the key expires, it is removed from your inventory.

Sort of like free weekends. Except every game. And more like 2 hours instead of the weekend. Maybe devs can set a lower demo time if their game is tiny.

 

I do really like this idea, but feel the problem is going to be games that are like 30Gb+, no-one wants to spend hours downloading a demo. Well, I don't anyway. At least with actual demos they are much smaller and easier to aquire.

Though for smaller games that would be cool.

 

I can confirm that they are currently refunding longer than 2 weeks. I bought a game back in February and had like 40 minutes playtime b/c it sucked hard. Got the refund today.

 

Yeah, supposedly Valve is allowing refunds all the way back from December 2014 at this point in time.

 

Could UT do do something similar with Unity?

 

I don't think there's any (good) reason why they should...?

 

Why? You have a fully featured free version you can test to your hearts content. Would you like a refund for your free software?

 

Remember that this topic is about Steam refunds. Unity's not for sale on Steam, so it's not relevant to the discussion. (Even if it made any sense.)

--Eric

 

I wish this option was around when I bought DayZ and H1Z1, 2 biggest regrets of my life. Money down the drain, it is clear the devs have no intentions of releasing DayZ and after 3 years of Alpha and almost nothing has been done since 3 years its pretty clear now.

 

+1
Unfortunately, there are still enough Players defending DayZ.

 

Hah, good point. Although there are always those few who will. I downloaded titanfall during its free weekend and got bored in less than an hour. Good thing I didn't buy into the hype. I like player vs player vs ai, but the game seemed lacking in content. Every match was the same guns, the same gundams and the same death match.

 

Yeah I love this new idea. This will increase the quality of games being put out there.

One of the things that make Early Access cancerous is it gives devs the ability to abuse customers who paid their hard earned money.

When they say its going to be in Beta this year, and in reality 3 years later its still in Alpha with mounts of promises again and when you complain they call you entitled, the devs also have paid trolls, trolling other forums like the H1Z1 forums and attacking people who speak out against DayZ.

The devs keep saying its Early Access and they keep quoting the post they made on the steam store page, yes its EA and yes we understand very well what EA means. Stop preaching to us like we never went to school the issue isn't that its in EA. The issue is that you LIE AND LIE and ABUSE the Early Access position, you make millions and keep hiding behind the EA as long as Valve allows you to. Fully well knowing you have 0 intentions of releasing the game.

You won't believe how happy I am that refunds are possible, now Bohemia can no longer abuse the system, having a game in Alpha for 3 years and calling people entitled, and now they won't hire paid trolls with level 0 private steam profiles to go on other discussion boards on steam and harass and terrorize users who steak out the truth about DayZ.

Maybe now that the money won't be flowing in they will get their act together.

Wanna bet all of a sudden, DayZ is going to start to make progress? and it it does not it means BI simply made enough money from all the suckers already.

But the free ride is over, its now time for everyone to work hard and produce quality and trust me anyone who plays games like DayZ for 1 hour is going to ask for a refund.

And watch how the attitude of devs will change, now they won't be singing read the store page on what Early Access means, now they will be singing a different tune since they money has stopped now. Now the new tune is about please keep us on your radar, we will be releasing a major update soon.

 

In the long run, this might encourage players to buy/try more games and ultimately lead to more solid sales. Of course, there will always be those toolbags who use the quarter on a string trick but they were never going to buy the game anyways.

 

You think so? I doubt it.

If I really want to play a game and cant afford it, I could get that same game on torrents. The thing is, I hardly play single player games. They feel incredibly boring compared to Online multi player games. And the best online games are Free to Play. And are so free that all micro-transactions are cosmetic. So its literally a 100% free game.

The issue of people buying a game to play for 2 hours just to get a free game, and the issue of piracy hardly even exist.

I still chuckle at people who claims that there is piracy on PC games and its why console devs dont release their games on the PC. HEY NEWS FLASH!!!! PC Gamers do not want your terrible buggy linear console port garbage. PC gamers want to play League of Legends, all 20 million of them daily. Nobody pirates games anymore because there is nothing worth pirating.

95% of steam users have a library sitting with each game averaging 0.2 hours play time and last played a year ago. People buy all these AAA titles on sale for $5 on steam sale due to impulse buy. Play for 0,2 hours then delete and goes back to DOTA 2, League and CS GO, world of warcraft etc.

Free to Play Online has changed everything in gaming. The only paid for games that people are actually interested in is Counter Strike GO which sits at half a million daily players. Everything else on steam are in the very low numbers. And the only reason CS GO does not average a million players daily like DOTA 2 is because it costs a small amount of money whereas DOTA 2 is free.

 

Sorry if I'm too narrow-minded to understand, but how does any of this make refunds decrease overall profits?

 

Lol.

 

We are PEOPLE not PRODUCT.

On redit, a guy got a refund for 46 games !!
There is jackass like that.

A refund system is a good thing. THIS refund system is a bad things.

You currently can ask a refund more easily than a purchase !
You can ask a refund on games you played more than 2 hours and more than 6 months ago.

As an indie dev, I want people to ask ME for a refund. Because that's something that I made, something that cost ma a lot (financially, and personnally), not much steam.
I should get this decision. If I want to give a refund to everyone who ask, it should be me who allowed it, not steam!

In the current system, steam looks nice for giving a refund to player that didn't enjoy your game. When this is you, the dev who give the refund...

If you play more than 4 hours on an 15$ early access game, even if it never going to be released, you get enough pleasure for your money. When you buy an early access game, you buy it in the current state and the current discount price.
You can't ask for a low price AND playing right away and getting pleasure from it AND free update AND guarantee that the game will fullfill all these promises.

Playing a game and getting a refund, is not like piracy, because it's legal! Steam made piracy legal!

 

If a refund system is a good thing, we should be coming up with constructive improvements instead of just whining. Any thoughts?

 

4 hours is NOT worth $15. Its worth about maybe $1.

I buy games on steam like this, I expect no less than 30 hours worth for $5. Generally I aim for hundreds and thousands of hours for $10 like Borderlands 2 GOTY.

I paid $60 for Diablo 3. I got thousands of hours. I don't mind paying $60 for a game but I must get atleast 2000 hours for it.

 

You realize that's an extreme position, I hope. 4 hours of decent entertainment is easily worth $15, or more. I'd far rather pay $15 for a 4-hour game that's a good unique experience (such as I did with The Swapper recently, though that may have been more like 5 or 6 hours), than waste 2000 hours mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again. Hardly anyone even has time for that, unless you have no job and nothing else to do. I'd even say that these days I find excessively long hours in a game actually a turn-off, and actively seek out shorter games. In short: quality, not quantity, is what's worth paying for.

--Eric

 

With that pricing strategy, you must not get to do very many things other than play cheap games. Pretty much everything costs more than $0.25/hr.

 

You shouldn't be measuring games in time/$ anyways.

 

Put it this way, lets say 4 hours is worth $15. its actually not even close for most people but lets say it is for arguments sake.
How then does one compete with hundreds of AAA titles that give atleast 20 hours a piece that sells for $5 a piece?

Lets go further, how about free to play games that generate revenue from microtransactions? I have spend $200 USD on Heroes of Newerth skins that were completely unnecessary. Yet I have bought AAA titles that were not worth even $1 because I played them for no more than 0.2 hours.

How much is a game really worth TODAY? thats the real question. Blizzard at one point was literally paying you to play Diablo 3.

MAybe I exaggerated with $1 for 4 hours? well I have thousands of hours in Diablo 3, TeamFortress 2, 5000 hours in heroes of newerth.

My brother has 6000 hours in Left 4 Dead 2.

I have 1200 hours in Counter Strike GO of which I paid $5 for. And because I found it to be worth much more than that, I bought $100 USD in skins for CS GO.
So you see it all depends. I am more likely to spend $100 US on my own terms for micro-transactions after I got a thousand hours, than I am ever likely to spend $5 on your game I never played for a possible 4 hours, much less $15.

As a consumer why would I pay $15 for 4 hours from your game when I can get hundreds and thousands from AAA and free to play titles for $5? Look I just bought Borderlands 2 Game of the year edition for $8 USD and I will have over 1000 hours easy from this.

 

I already answered that quite clearly. I vote with my wallet and pay for high quality, shorter games, since that's what I tend to enjoy more. 6000 hours of any game sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me, not an argument in favor of your position—why would I grind through the same thing repeatedly when there are so many other things to experience in a limited lifespan? But hey, whatever floats your boat.

--Eric

 

No. You wasted thousands of hours clicking on the same monsters while going through the same levels over and over again. That's not entertainment, that's a compulsive disorder.

 

Well thats my brother with 6K hours and I offered him another free game and he refuses to touch it. Here is the catch, valve makes by far the best games on the planet. If CS GO was out many years ago with its competitive mode I would have had around 10,000 hours in that game easily.

I actually had to delete CS GO due to an addiction problem I also deleted Heroes of Newerth where I also had an addiction problem.

For what its worth I have 16,000 hours or more in Starcraft / Brood War expansion been playing since 1998. And its still active online and supported by Blizzard to this day.

Here is another legend, Team Fortress 2. Got 1800 Hours in that and deleted to save my limited SSD space. Life is short yes, but why force myself to play something that is not fun? I forced myself $200 US worth of useless games on impulse buy all of which has 0.2 Hours. I have what?

Bioshock Infinite untouched
Borderlands 1 untouched.
Borderlands 2, 4 hours counting as of today and likely over 1000 very easy. great for a $8 game with all DLC
Bioshock 2 untouched
GTA 4 untouched
GTA 5 0.8 hours
DayZ 300 hours but deleted when I realized the game is going nowhere.
H1Z1 12 hours but deleted due to addiction
Battlefield 3 about 30 Hours, totally worth the price of FREE with EA on the house thing
Battlefield 4 about 100 Hours or so. Really S***ty game BF4 is, garbage graphics and stinks of console port. Its a sad day when BF3 an older game has much better graphics,.
Titanfall maybe 30 hours and deleted cause its boring and uses 50GB of space for no good reason. Waste of $20 USD it was worth maybe $4 to me.
Killing floor 1 about 3 hours, waste of $5
Killing floor 2 about 10 Hours, fantastic game and worth every penny of the $30 I paid. I will likely get thousands of hours out of KF2. Just waiting for some more patches is all since its in EA but its already a blase but have to avoid addiction.

I paid $17 for BF4 Premium and regret it after 100 hours. Money wasted

 

I spent more hours on Diablo 2. And that is the point of ARPG games, doing the same thing over and over for legendary loot. As for levels in some ARPG games they are randomized dungeons.

 

So basically, you're saying that any game focusing on a story or handcrafted open-world element should not be made because there's no way for them to compete in providing content in terms of time.

 

I just bought The Stanley Parable after seeing one of the developers in a GDC talk.

I've played the game for 55 minutes and in that time I've completed it 4 times, and I've unlocked 50% of the achievements. As for the game itself I didn't care for it at all. I found the entire game to be really tedious. And the source engine with its massive loading times didn't exactly help.

But it poses an interesting dilemma for Steam refunds. I've gotten what I wanted from the game, but I can still refund it if I want. Even if I really liked the game I could still refund it. There's in fact a lot of positive reviews for the game with less than 2 hours play time. This is an area Valve must look on in my opinion.

 

So, did you refund it?

 

Nah, seeing as I completed the game I didn't feel like it, and money is no issue for me. It's only about principle.

Technical issues, douchy developers, lies in general. Those are refund reasons for me.

 

^ good for you. I wouldn't refund it either.

But if I could have gotten a chance to refund DayZ would do it in a heartbeat. Even if I completed it.
Never have I seen the devs put time and money into abusing other people on different discussion boards on steam with private steam profiles instead of fixing their stupid game thats been in Alpha for over 3 years and was promised to be in beta 2 years ago and still is in Alpha.

I tell you steam refunds is the best thing that has ever happened.

 

On the contrary they should be made.

I just won't buy it until it goes on sale for $3

Let the richer folks the ones who goes by the book buy and support it at full price. If richer people didn't buy all the useless cosmetics in Heroes of Newerth then the game would be dead. I only buy gold collection skins which are $15 USD a piece. Or some selected Ultimate Skins which are $30 USD a piece.

But those are for the heroes I like. What about skins for heroes I don't like? who is supposed to buy it? what about useless account name colors? who is supposed to buy it if I don't? and what happens if people don't buy it?

I never say no to something being made for different consumers. But for me I only buy high priced games like $30 and $60 USD games with minimum 1000 hours a piece. Too bad it don't always play out like that.

ow BTW I spent $100 USD in path of exile so far and its a 100% FREE game. I have 700 hours so far. If devs want money from me it must be on my own terms else they not getting more than $3, thats just me.

 

exactly Don't generalize your case to every one

The title of the thread is "How will it effect an indie?" You clearly don't buy any indie game.
You are a AAA player, so your current case is not even relevant in this thread.

People buying indie game want an alternative to AAA. AAA do very well on unoriginal concept.
They don't take risk. That's your choice (like my brother), and if you like it, it's good for you!
(my previous coworker still work in AAA industry making good game, and they also need to eat, so continu supporting them..)

Indie game offer alternative gameplay or redo some kind of games that was dead (nostalgia).
Some player seek this kind of game.

If you have money to buy only one video game you are rich That's also your choise of not buying things at full price, but it won't help people make other and better game. More money in your pocket, but less in the artist that work to make you good games.

Personaly I get bored on all thoose 1000 hours game, because you usually spend hours looting to unlock things.
My brother like it (like you), not me. We are two kind of player. We are both right of doing what we like to do.

 

I wonder how liberally people are using it. Personally Im loving the refund policy, I can try a game and if i dont like it just get a refund. Makes more willing to try games but alot less likely to keep them, I just bought 3 games and returned 2. And then used the refund to buy another one. I guess people with games will sell more

 

I believe as a developer I still think its good, you will have less bad reviews to people who are mad. As a gamer I like it as I been ripped of from games that were bad, or lied about releasing.. So when making the game have an account were if the person gets a refund have the account suspended then they can't play..

 

How will you have less bad reviews?

 

Doesn't getting a refund delete your review? Otherwise that would be very open for abuse.

 

Overall, as a gamer I was really happy when I heard the new policy.

Perhaps they could bring the 2 hours of gameplay down to 1.

But for some bigger games, 1 hour = time to setup the game and go through the tutorial.