alt Hacker NewsThanks to Australian customer protection laws, Steam has some of the most lenient refund policies among digital software stores. You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours. Plus there are frequent sales. Don’t underestimate the psychological impact of making people feel “I have to buy this now or the deal will be gone.”
I genuinely do not know how to get a refund from the google play store or the apple equivalent.
(The downside of the Steam policy is it makes Steam unviable for games that can be played in full very quickly. Develops can also game the system by dragging out early game so the player is over the refundable time by the time they reach the rough parts. But this is for another discussion.)
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> You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.
The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:
* You have played for less than two hours.
* You bought it in the past two weeks.
There's no problem getting a refund for apps in my experience, I've done it a handful of times when I've changed my mind and it was easy and fully automated.
> Thanks to Australian customer protection laws
Source? I always thought this was a general Steam policy, as it's available pretty much anywhere.
I got one from the play store once - I called them. The conversation was a bit surreal ( they kept telling me it wasn’t their fault , before eventually suggesting a refund )
The ACCC did win a $3M AUD judgement against them for their refund policies:
* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)
* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)
> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.
> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.
> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...
I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...
Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...
But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.
> Thanks to Australian customer protection laws, Steam has some of the most lenient refund policies among digital software stores. You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.
I think it’s actually worldwide?