Here is a tweet I saw a few days ago about this. This guy is one of the developers who made Octodad. He claims that almost all of the refunds requested were from people who bought the game when it was on sale months ago. It seems like Steam is going well beyond the 14 day window they said they would follow.
Yes it's good for consumers if people can refund broken products but people were obviously going to abuse the system. What is to stop someone from buying and installing Arkham Knight and then putting Steam into offline mode?
I'm assuming it wouldn't be that hard to beat a game like that during the 14 day window and then remove all traces of it from your PC before putting Steam back in online mode. It would show as 0 hours played and you could get a refund for having less than 2 hours of playtime and requesting the refund within 14 days of purchase.
As far as Octodad goes, some developers have mentioned that some refunds fell outside the 14 day window. I'm sure Valve will resolve that soon. Also, as far as the offline trick goes, I have to believe that Valve has thought of that scenario and has configured Steam appropriately. Finally, as many people have pointed out, if someone really wants to play games for free, the VAST majority are not going to bother with the hassle of the Steam refund system. Yeah it's relatively easy, but there's always the chance a refund request will be rejected, not to mention the delay to get your money back. If you want to play a game for free, you're going to just pirate it because piracy is so simple.
I think that the "fear" that indie devs are going to suffer from this policy is very overblown, and the article posted on DSOG was from a developer who made a quick mobile port (a genre that most Steam players don't like) and the game has a negative overall review. I think really that this is going to increase overall sales for indie devs and even AAA. The fact that games can now be returned will make people more likely to try out new games since they know they won't be stuck with it if they don't like it. And yeah, there's always that group that will abuse the system, but I think Valve will monitor people to do their best that this won't be abused, and overall the increased sales will overcome that. People are also forgetting that this can also help clean up Steam a bit. Currently there's a big problem with shady developers who are simply buying Unity asset sets, making little to no changes to them, and then selling them as full games, which is making the already awful throwing grounds of Greenlight and Early Access even worse (if that were possible.) If you don't know what I'm talking about, Jim Sterling goes into the practice quite well here:
And let's not forget that thanks to this system, publishers will now have to think twice about rolling out broken pieces of garbage like AC: Unity and Aliens: Colonial Marines. Overall though, it's simply just to early to tell the definite impact of this new system. I mean hell, it hasn't even been out for a week at this point.
. Just make sure you get your free upgrade.
