The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[Infinitron]

https://medium.com/@galyonkin/how-many-games-are-eligible-for-steam-refunds-7a4f3ea74c19

How many games
could be eligible for
Steam refunds?






As usual with any kind of refund only handful of people will bother enough to request their money back, especially when it means waiting at least 7 days for an approval.

Of course it’s not like you have to do anything difficult, so the share of people requesting refunds on Steam will probably be higher compared to your average TV shop.

But let’s imagine a perfect world with perfectly rational customers, where every person that have played the game for less than 2 hours will at least think of requesting a refund from Steam.

How many refunds are we talking about?
The Xpaw of SteamDB did some calculations based on SteamSpy data and what you’re about to read might shock you (Sorry, couldn’t resist):

59% of all paid Steam games have median playtime of less than 2 hours.
That’s 2656 games to be exact. And it only includes games that have been already released — Early Access or otherwise.

Most of the Steam games could be considered short by Steam owns standards
Now it looks scary. And it is scary. But of course those smaller games might be big in numbers, but they don’t sell this well, right?

True, to some extent.

Shorter games sell worse than longer games
We’re still talking about 356 million copies combined of games that have been played for less than 2 hours by an average player. And it doesn’t account for people that bought a game but never bothered to launch it.

Of course you still have 14 days window to request a refund, so it won’t affect most of the already sold games. But it gives you an understanding on how many games could be affected by refunds.

60% of all owned paid games on Steam were either played for less than 2 hours or not played at all,
meaning they should be eligible for refund if players cared enough to request it withing the 14 days of purchase.

60% of owned copies of paid games were technically eligible for refund at some point
This difference between short and long games is also visible in average price.

Shorter games cost almost twice as less
So, yeah, longer games cost almost twice as more and sell twice as much on average compared to shorter ones.

Is it bad?
Well, It depends.

For starters, not all short games are necessarily bad. You might get a satisfying gameplay experience from 1-hour arcade or story-driven game and you might get irritated by long and tedious roguelike or survivalcraft that requires hundreds of hours to master.

It would be interesting to see if most of the short games on Steam are intended to be short or they’re simply bad games.

Turns out — yes, on average short games get lower userscore, but difference isn’t as dramatic as you’d expect.

Shorter games are rated lower, but difference isn’t huge
So, no, shorter games aren’t necessarily all bad.

What’s the takeaway here?
There are a lot of short games on Steam — in fact, most of Steam games could be considered short by Steam own standards.

These games do not sell as well as long games, are rated lower and cost less, but nevertheless, they account for 37% of all game copies owned on Steam.

 

[jagged-jimmy]

More like everyone can't keep up with all the sales and slowly building an overwhelming backlog of games.

I know it's true for me - while i was buying games i wanted to play right away in the past, now i am buying intresting games at the right price to play them "later". This explains short playtimes, as people install, check it out and then continue playing their current time sinks.

 

[bozia2012]

From exactly 700 games I have on Steam, about 20 are store bought (almost all from sales).

So while I haven't even touched ca. 600 of them, they're not eligible for refund anyway. I imagine lots of people are in the same situation and this fucks up the stats.

 

[Executr]

Finally they've implemented some sort of quality control and real curation (user reviews don't count): http://www.dsogaming.com/news/indie...m-pc-gamers-show-graphs-to-back-their-claims/

Indie Developers Report Steam Refund Abuse From PC Gamers, Show Graphs To Back Their Claims

It appears that Steam’s new refund policy will hurt indie developers more than they initially thought. Today, Qwiboo and Puppygames shared some graphs, showing declined sales due to Steam’s new policy. It’s still too early to speak, but from the looks of it, Steam’s new refund policy allows gamers to play and test a lot of games for free.

On one hand, that’s not a bad thing. In the past, we’ve been getting a lot of demos. Nowadays, game demos can be really counted on the fingers of one hand. Okay okay, that’s an exaggeration but you get the point. Thanks to Steam’s new refund policy, players can test and see whether a game is worth their time.

On the other hand, this new policy will hurt indie developers. You see, some gamers are really greedy and will take advantage of this new policy. What was that? Your game costs as much as a beer? No matter. And that’s the sad thing about this whole thing.

Take for example Qwiboo. This indie dev released on Steam Beyond Gravity; a procedurally generated “platformer” where you jump in-between planets and try to collect as many pickups as you can. The game is priced at $1.99 and has been on Steam for almost nine months. During that time, the game has received a lot of positive reviews. And this is what happened when Valve announced Steam’s new refunds policy.



As Qwiboo tweeted, out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That has never happened before as Qwiboo noted.

"It's refunds. Out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That's 72% of purchases. Rate of refunds before was minimal. #SteamRefunds"

— Qwiboo (@qwiboo) June 6, 2015

Qwiboo agreed that refunds should be available, however this new 2-hour policy is currently being abused by a lot of gamers. And while this may not hurt triple-A titles that last 10-20 hours, it does hurt indie devs. Qwiboo also provided another graph, proving that Steam’s upcoming Summer Sale is not to be blamed for these low sales.



And Qwiboo is not the only indie developer that suffers from this exploitation. PuppyGames has also shared a similar graph for its Steam sales. As we can clearly see, sales took a dive after the announcement of Steam’s new refunds policy.



It remains to be seen whether Valve will react to this whole exploitation of Steam’s new refunds policy. In its current state, players can enjoy indie games for free.

Our opinion is that Steam’s refund ‘time-played’ policy should be dynamic. For indie titles that are priced at $2, it should be around 20 minutes or so. For games priced at $30, it should be around one hour and for games at $59.99 it should be 2 hours. Or at least something like that.

The point is that in its current state, Steam’s new refunds ‘time-played’ policy can hurt indie devs.

 

[Jick Magger]

Maybe we should wait more than a few days before we start throwing around statistics.

 

[Caim]

Qwiboo has 2 games on sale: Beyond Gravity and Bike Baron (not on Steam). They go for $2 each. They state that they sold 18 units in 3 days. If we extrapolate this for both games across a month, this is a total of $720 pre-taxes per month.

If that's an average income for an indie dev... Well, I wouldn't quit my day job.

 

[Don Peste]

Maybe ask yourself first: If Steam didn't exist, would your game be another freeware title available to play at Kongregate?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Apparentely Beyond Gravity was in a sale in the week leading up to the Steam refund policy, which might explain the drastic downfall. It also makes this a case of biased data.

So yeah, ignore the doomsayers for now and wait for better numbers.

 

[Spectacle]

Could this be a devious plan by GabeN to discourage indie devs from submitting crap that isn't worth playing at any price?

 

[Whiran]

Apparentely Beyond Gravity was in a sale in the week leading up to the Steam refund policy, which might explain the drastic downfall. It also makes this a case of biased data.

So yeah, ignore the doomsayers for now and wait for better numbers.

Or maybe he should create a game that isn't terrible?

https://youtu.be/eYANkiPR4dw?t=2m9s

I'll be very happy if people refund really bad games. I can't believe people actually release this stuff and expect people to pay for it.

 

[Thane Solus]

refunding is great, the thing is that 2 hours is too much. If it remains like this i bet it will create another disgusting trend, where some devs, will make that 2 hours as awesome and as grindish as possible, and after those 2 hours, everything will be shit.


There should a 30 min mark. You dont need more than 30 mins to know that you like that game, or if it works slow or at all on your PC. 2 hours could be good too, but knowing that can be exploited, and knowing valve support (automatic on refunds lmao), its no good... Still, its a good start.

 

[Spectacle]

refunding is great, the thing is that 2 hours is too much. If it remains like this i bet it will create another disgusting trend, where some devs, will make that 2 hours as awesome and as grindish as possible, and after those 2 hours, everything will be shit.


There should a 30 min mark. You dont need more than 30 mins to know that you like that game, or if it works slow or at all on your PC. 2 hours could be good too, but knowing that can be exploited, and knowing valve support (automatic on refunds lmao), its no good... Still, its a good start.

For full length games 30min is usuallu just enough to finish the tutorial, and nobody expects that to be particularly fun. For many games it takes at least an hour to get to the meat.

You could perhaps add an "expected playtime" value to the steam store, reported by the developer. The shorter the reported playtime the shorter the refund window. That would give devs the incentive to be honest about how much playtime they claim their games have.

 

[Thane Solus]

refunding is great, the thing is that 2 hours is too much. If it remains like this i bet it will create another disgusting trend, where some devs, will make that 2 hours as awesome and as grindish as possible, and after those 2 hours, everything will be shit.


There should a 30 min mark. You dont need more than 30 mins to know that you like that game, or if it works slow or at all on your PC. 2 hours could be good too, but knowing that can be exploited, and knowing valve support (automatic on refunds lmao), its no good... Still, its a good start.

For full length games 30min is usuallu just enough to finish the tutorial, and nobody expects that to be particularly fun. For many games it takes at least an hour to get to the meat.

You could perhaps add an "expected playtime" value to the steam store, reported by the developer. The shorter the reported playtime the shorter the refund window. That would give devs the incentive to be honest about how much playtime they claim their games have.

You are right, a percentage will be better and/or based and the price, both will do. But yeah, 10-20% percent of the playtime could, but then again this will spawn trends and other things that will makes things even more horrible.

The simpler and safest will be based on price:

50$+ 2-4 hours
25-50$ 2 hours
Under 25$ 1 hour
Under 10$ 30 mins

Why? Cause if you give big boys triple AAA shit a small window, be sure that they invest anything to keep you in that window and after that, laugh all the way to the bank.

But then again, if you look at the stats, around 50 or 60% of the games on Steam are not played more than 2 hours. So its pretty tricky to balance this, and some of the devs may suffer badly, others might get additional sales.

Of course a lot of shovelware and mobile ports will suffer from this, and its great, but at the same time until valve reaches a good balance refund system, many good devs might suffer too. Will see.

Overall its good, tweaked, this might be good for the industry and steam store quality, at least in theory...

 

[sexbad?]

I would imagine that some of the folks getting refunds on little $2 pieces of junk aren't going to stop there. Value said that they would penalize people who make a habit of refunding and end up abusing the system. This is good for little devs who make cheap shit that is nonetheless reputable, which some of these guys apparently are. However, you have to wait more than like three fucking days to collect data and weed out the abusers of the system. These fuckers are immediately cry though.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Only 25 games on sale this week.

Steam Summer Sale starting this week as good as confirmed.

 

[Coyote]

As I said elsewhere, IMO the focus on potential abuses of the refund system is overblown. The number of sales lost to people exploiting the system to avoid paying for games is likely to be negligible compared to the number gained from people who are willing to take risks on games they would have previously avoided out of fears that they wouldn't run, might turn out shit, might go on sale next week, etc., especially since piracy is still an easier way for people who want to play a game for free to do so. If anyone loses a significant number of sales from this change, it's won't be from people abusing the system; it will be from people using the system legitimately to request refunds for buggy/crappy games, people who would have been shit out of luck under the old policy.

Let's take a closer look at the data cited by that article:

Take for example Qwiboo. This indie dev released on Steam Beyond Gravity; a procedurally generated “platformer” where you jump in-between planets and try to collect as many pickups as you can. The game is priced at $1.99 and has been on Steam for almost nine months. During that time, the game has received a lot of positive reviews. And this is what happened when Valve announced Steam’s new refunds policy.



As Qwiboo tweeted, out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That has never happened before as Qwiboo noted.

"It's refunds. Out of 18 sales 13 refunded in just last 3 days. That's 72% of purchases. Rate of refunds before was minimal. #SteamRefunds"

— Qwiboo (@qwiboo) June 6, 2015

Qwiboo agreed that refunds should be available, however this new 2-hour policy is currently being abused by a lot of gamers. And while this may not hurt triple-A titles that last 10-20 hours, it does hurt indie devs.

(A) The writer is assuming based on the positive reviews that people aren't just refunding the game because it's shit. But Steam's user review system - which I assume he's basing that claim on, since the four positive reviews listed by Metacritic for the iOS version don't qualify as "a lot" by any meaningful metric - is very easily abused; just get a bunch of friends/shills to leave positive reviews for your game, and voila! "User reviews: Very Positive" at the top of your store page. Meanwhile, 17 of the 20 reviews rated most helpful for this game are negative. I've seen buggy, poorly-translated Russian shovelware with a better ratio than that.

(B) Beyond Gravity was one of the weeklongs from May 25 to June 1. Sales dropped drastically after your game lost frontpage visibility and increased in price? MUST BE THOSE REFUNDS.

(C) The rate of refunds increased after Valve changed its policy so that it was possible to get refunds without waiting for the planets to align and sacrificing a goat to GabeN? Well, okay. In other news, the sky is blue and water is wet.

(D) This article kind of skirts around it, but most of the complaints from the indie scene have been from people whose games are short enough to complete within the two-hour period. As far as I can tell, Beyond Gravity is an open-ended game without any clearly-defined ending. So regardless of whether or not people are rampantly abusing the system, in this particular case the fact that they're requesting refunds only demonstrates that the game fails to provide compelling enough gameplay to keep people interested in continuing to play past the two-hour cutoff.

And Qwiboo is not the only indie developer that suffers from this exploitation. PuppyGames has also shared a similar graph for its Steam sales. As we can clearly see, sales took a dive after the announcement of Steam’s new refunds policy.



It remains to be seen whether Valve will react to this whole exploitation of Steam’s new refunds policy. In its current state, players can enjoy indie games for free.

I'm not familiar with Droid Assault, but of the other Puppygames games, only Titan Attacks could feasibly be completed within 2 hours by someone. If people are returning their games, it's not because they've completed them before the two-hour cutoff. And again, if your game fails to provide compelling enough gameplay for people to want to continue playing past that point, that's hardly the fault of the refund system, is it?

I could be wrong; there could be more people out there than I'd expect who aren't willing or don't know how to pirate and who are interested in playing these games but not willing to shell out a buck for them during a sale. And I'd be open to evidence such as, say, achievement data demonstrating that a large number of people requesting refunds of a game had completed it. But the evidence presented in that article just doesn't paint a compelling case that people are exploiting the system rather than using it exactly the way it's intended.

 

[Bruticis]

Only 25 games on sale this week.

Steam Summer Sale starting this week as good as confirmed.

It was confirmed a week ago when the mystery cards hit and the coupons expired on the 11th.

 

[Jaesun]

What is the deal with the collectible cards you get on STEAM? Can you actually buy stuff with them or what? I have like tons of them.

 

[darthaegis]

What is the deal with the collectible cards you get on STEAM? Can you actually buy stuff with them or what? I have like tons of them.

You can create badges to get steam xp to get more friend slots (you usually have enough though) and to get showcases of cheeves, badges etc. (e-penis stuff.)
Alternatively you can sell that shit for steam wallet money.

 

[Bruticis]

What is the deal with the collectible cards you get on STEAM? Can you actually buy stuff with them or what? I have like tons of them.

Sell them now before the value tanks. They'll be 5 cents by the end of the sale.

 

[pippin]

Refunds are something a business should do, but I do wonder if they are adding this to try to moderate the ammount of negative reviews which say "OMG GAME IS SHIT BECAUSE IT WONT START" without realizing you just need to download a patch or change a little line here and there in the .ini file. It should motivate devs to worry about optimizing their products, but we all know even AAA devs can't optimize anything even if their lives depended on that.

Other than that, indie devs should read a book or two about economy, especially anything related to supply and demand.

 

[Metro]

What is the deal with the collectible cards you get on STEAM? Can you actually buy stuff with them or what? I have like tons of them.

Sell on the market for money. Use money to preorder FO4.

 

[Thane Solus]

As I said elsewhere, IMO the focus on potential abuses of the refund system is overblown. The number of sales lost to people exploiting the system to avoid paying for games is likely to be negligible compared to the number gained from people who are willing to take risks on games they would have previously avoided out of fears that they wouldn't run, might turn out shit, might go on sale next week, etc., especially since piracy is still an easier way for people who want to play a game for free to do so. If anyone loses a significant number of sales from this change, it's won't be from people abusing the system; it will be from people using the system legitimately to request refunds for buggy/crappy games, people who would have been shit out of luck under the old policy.
.................

Yeah, i am inclined to agree with people that say this, since it make sense. People should buy more now, so in reality we should see an increase in sales. Of course it wont apply to buggy games, or mobile ports or really bad games.

 

[Don Peste]

HOWEVER...

 

[Destroid]

Maybe this will drive prices up with the net effect that devs will make the same amount of money they always did but peoples steam accounts wont be loaded with garbage they never play.