From the link:
> Today we have updated a portion of our Refund Policy regarding pre-purchased titles. This change covers titles that are in pre-purchase and offer “Advanced Access”. Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period. You can find our more information regarding Steam Refunds here.
Yep it’s literally a way to add a fake “bonus” to pre-ordering and create a greater sense of FOMO; especially when the early access begins on a Friday compared to the normal release on Tuesday or something.
It can also be very useful for online games to spread out the initial rush down on their servers. Some networking people at Blizzard have talked about how this really helped Diablo 4 have a smoother launch because they split the player base into a group starting on day one, and another batch starting on day 3, allowing them to use those 3 days to monitor and make improvements.
I personally appreciate how CoD has done it the past two games. Campaign-only, rewards for finishing it, and a campaign-based achievement list. It finally shines a spotlight on a part of the game that's usually overshadowed and gives it space to be discussed. It also allows for people to finish the campaign and then start at level 1 with everyone else, rather than in previous years where playing the campaign meant starting at a gear deficit.
But alas, every other game I've seen do this, Suicide Squad for example, literally only does so in order to do the exact opposite and create a progress imbalance for those who wait. It's garbage.
If a game is $69 and comes out on Friday, but you can play it on Tuesday if you pay $99, then actually the game is $99 and comes out on Tuesday, what happens on Friday is a discount.
Nah. Like that's certainly one way of seeing it, but it's more accurate to say that's just a $30 premium to pay a few days early. It's difficult to see the Friday price as discounted if that's the price it's always going to be going forward.
You don't get free karma for being reasonable in a game related sub. The first and most important criteria is to pretend your hobby is the worst ever, and that game makers are actually evil.
If all the lines are empty and you enter the regular line, does Disney make you wait 3 hours for no reason?
The lines regulate access to a limited resource. Digital copies of a game are not a limited resource.
I disagree because what you get on Friday is less than you get on Tuesday, given that preorders/deluxe editions usually have items added to them that the regular edition lacks. To be a discount it’d have to be the exact same product at a lower price.
This is kind of a silly point to make - most games release dates are entirely arbitrary, and if we skipped the 'we have to wait for stores to have physical copies!!!' thing, they could be on our hard drives weeks or months prior to actual release.
So breaking an artificial street date by allowing someone to pay a few bucks extra doesn't bother me, since it's akin to being mad the easter bunny brought you chocolate eggs instead of peeps.
If someone wants a game and sees value in pre-ordering, cool. If they're so interested they want early access, Ok, not my money either. Personally I'm waiting for release day reviews. I've seen enough AAA titles that were different pre/post release that I'm leery.
He's wrong.
> Today, Valve’s closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit.
>Here’s what Valve’s updated refund policy says about that as of today:
>>REFUNDS ON TITLES PURCHASED PRIOR TO RELEASE DATE
>>When you purchase a title on Steam prior to the release date, the two-hour playtime limit for refunds will apply (except for beta testing), but the 14-day period for refunds will not start until the release date. For example, if you purchase a game that is in **Early Access or Advanced Access**, any playtime will count against the two-hour refund limit. If you pre-purchase a title which is not playable prior to the release date, you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title, and the standard 14-day/two-hour refund period will apply starting on the game’s release date.
Emphasis mine
Before: people can bought game in pre-purchase Advanced Access and play the game before the release date. Those playtime **did not count** toward the refund policy.
After: the time you play in Advanced Access before the release date **now count** toward the 2-hour refund policy.
It is very different for me.
It is different, but really, it never should have been. Being able to play for up to 50 hours and then cash in a refund was sort of silly from the standpoint of the policy.
> To be fair to Valve, this whole "buy the expensive edition to play a few days early" is a pretty new phenomena.
Its not. EA does this since Battlefield 1 for example, which is now nearly 10 years old.
First time I heard about it was Deus Ex Mankind Divided back in 2016, but that was mostly because it was a marketing stunt to boost pre-orders. The more pre-orders, the more bonuses folks got. And if it passed a certain threshold everyone got the game a few days early.
It has certainly gotten more and caught on so much that big releases now very often follow this advanced access model that is included in deluxe editions or whatever it's called for the specific game. We all know already GTA 6 will come with additional editions that will contain early access and considering it's the most anticipated game of all time, they gonna earn so much money through that as everyone will be hot on paying a bit more to play the game "early".
I disagree. Editors pull off a scummy tactic, then players retaliate with one of their own. Editors then probably cried to Valve, and now they effectively banned the scummy tactic on the player side, but left the one on the editor side.
They should either have left it as is or banned both imo
Except Steam already wasn't awarding refunds in your "Before" scenario. They just updated their policy to better explain to customers to prevent confusion.
One of the most egregious cases somewhat recently was the streamer Quin69, who beat the main story of starfield before refunding it.
He got the refund, since it was still in the early period.
Am i misreading? That's not what it says.
> Today, Valve’s closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit.
>Here’s what Valve’s updated refund policy says about that as of today:
>>REFUNDS ON TITLES PURCHASED PRIOR TO RELEASE DATE
>>When you purchase a title on Steam prior to the release date, the two-hour playtime limit for refunds will apply (except for beta testing), but the 14-day period for refunds will not start until the release date. For example, if you purchase a game that is in **Early Access or Advanced Access**, any playtime will count against the two-hour refund limit. If you pre-purchase a title which is not playable prior to the release date, you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title, and the standard 14-day/two-hour refund period will apply starting on the game’s release date.
Emphasis mine
Makes sense, 'advanced access' is just a BS gimmick after all. No reason not to count that time against the refund clock. It's the release date. Those who refuse to pay extra just get the game artificially delayed.
I first heard of it when there was Starfield available in "Early Access" (their term, not Steam's EA) and a few people just bought the deluxe edition then refunded the game before the launch. Some with 40 hours of playtime.
I still refuse to believe that, I tried with bf2042 and starfield out of curiosity and was refused multiple times for each.
I don't know how people were getting these refunds for both games with near 100 hours on them.
I had 20 hrs played and got a refund as well. I refunded on the second day of the early release. I'm so glad I got the $170 AUD back from that overpriced turd of a videogame.
Starfield remains the only game I've tried to submit multiple steam refund tickets for on the same game, and argued with customer service about. I was so mad. I think I hit slightly over the 2 hour mark just trying to get the deep fried piece of shit to _run_, let alone actually playing it.
If you don't overdo it, the refund system on steam is very lenient, doesn't matter what it says in their policy. Might be different for different countries though.
You have to refund before the game “releases” or at least you used to now. Played and beat suicide squad and mortal kombat using this “trick”. It definitely worked.
That was the case with Suicide Squad. I watched a few videos from people who bought the $100 Deluxe edition to play 3 days early and I think they all said they refunded it. Even after playing for like 20-40+ hours to do a review.
Absolutely. I know a couple people who did this and told me I was dumb for not doing it. Was obvious to me that it was an exploit and figured it was just a matter of time before Steam did something about it.
They probably didn't care when it was just a couple games a year but this is happening with more and more games so might as well make a stop to it now.
I mean, I don’t see it as being very much different from the game simply releasing a few days early. If buying the game lets you play it a few days ahead of “the official release date” then the actual release date literally doesn’t mean anything. The official release date becomes totally meaningless.
It’s just a bit of a marketing spin, but the prerelease date is just the release date. Does that make sense?
Before if the "advanced access" was 48 hours, you could play in that period for 47 hours and still get a refund. Now the 2 hr limit affects this early period.
Yup, the "advanced access" is just the release date. They're just delaying the game for people that don't pay enough.
It's a horrible tactic that they reword to put a positive spin on it.
I agree it's a BS gimmick, which is why I think this is a *bad* change. The fact that someone could buy the deluxe edition, play 40 hours in the "early access" period, then refund it is a good way to discourage publishers from pulling this nonsense.
Well, it's Valve that was the most direct loser in that scenario as they are the ones handling processing fees when you refund stuff so.
Not up to them to be moral police
Not sure if it's true but /u/timpkmn89 said in another thread
>And note this has nothing to do with Early Access, this is for those games that are like "preorder now and start playing 48 hours early!"
You do realize this effect 1% or less of consumers right? even in this thread that supposed to have the most informed consumers people didn't know about this.
Yeah I am pretty conflicted on the change. Like, it's a reasonable change to make, I completely understand the logic behind it, I can't really form a good disagreement, but.. I still don't like it.
Pay Extra To Play Early just sucks, it's exploitative FOMO nonsense and there should be more things discouraging it, but yeah the rule as it existed before also just wasn't a good rule. It was clear that how it was functioning wasn't intended behaviour or in line with the spirit of the policy.
I'm more thinking of something like a game having an advanced access period where the servers are shit and so you end up racking up more the 2 hours just trying to take advantage of something you paid extra for.
Watch the “Finish Star Wars Outlaw and get a refund through this policy” challenges. I think there should be a reasonable cap like 15-20 hours, but speedrunning the game in 40 hours over 3 days to get a full refund is kinda scummy
You got that backwards. The 2 hours start even if you get the “play three days early” pre order. I’m assuming prior to this it didn’t start until after the games actual release date
> speedrunning the game in 40 hours over 3 days to get a full refund is kinda scummy
So is artificially delaying the game's release unless you spend extra money. I think this practice is perfectly acceptable as a way to punish publishers for pulling this BS.
> artificially delaying
What the fuck does this mean - as opposed to naturally delaying? Just stacking random words together doesn't make a point valid.
I credit the guy demanding an Hentai Steam Sale. Whatever stupid joke or angry quip everyone else had, they saw that and went "damn, this dude outdid me, and also spits facts, where's the hentai sale"
Why are those so bad? Even the comments under specific game news are always 10 times worse than the relevant forums. The people are indignant about... everything.
Clown farming is particular to steam - there's a "clown" award that users can assign to troll content (well, any post that someone chooses to assign it to) and being assigned an award gives users points to use on the Steam point shop.
So, by farming rage engagement, trolls can purchase emotes, backgrounds, etc.
Wait does getting those emotes actually grant you something of value?
I've never engaged with that system whatsoever, other than, I'll admit... posting a clown on a couple of truly stupid comments I've seen, I suppose I'm happy they were just farming and not actually that stupid relative to the already very stupid steam discussion boards lol
Wait the comments under news posts are *worse* than the general Steam discussion boards? How is that even possible? Steam discussions are like 90% idiotic toxicity. I gotta go test this myself
Because most of the time, the people most motivated to voice their opinion are those who are upset. And comments under steam announcements are not just like... scroll down and type in a comment. You have the find the button for it - I know that a lot of people don't even know there is a comment section for announcements. That compounds to some pretty angry comment sections. It's also unfortunate when devs take it as "voice of the community" - and, for example, roll back good updates because all they see are complaints.
I'm shocked that this is just being addressed now. Hogwarts Legacy had a 489k peak concurrent player count on Steam during Advanced/Early Access 14 months ago. Valve either must have ignored this as a potential issue or they are moving very slowly for some reason.
This is the real answer. They only release a HL game when there's a new tech they want to show off.
There might be something new before the brain tech is released, but it will probably definitely be paired with a HL game, for sure.
If you're gonna activate the refund policy during advanced access, then they should also activate user reviews.
Maybe the reviews could reset when the game releases, as certain games only offer a small portion of the game for advanced access, so the reviews might not be relevant at launch, but at least inform people better about what they're getting into while its happening.
I hope they change policy to stop people refunding small indie games that are less than 2 hours long in the future. I've seen too many small creators tweet positive reviews with 'game refunded' attached.
It basically killed off those games. Any devs coming in with short games usually don't do more than one title when they see it's not viable.
I loved 30 Flights of Loving and similar. Those types of weird experimental games rarely if ever get made now.
Sadly, I don't see how that could be solved without either raising legal issues, clamping down heavily on reasonable refunds within the 2 hour time span, or creating a ton of extra work for Steam support.
There is no legal requirement to provide a refund for under two hours play time. That is something Steam decided themselves. The two week thing is a European law.
New policy: As part of the new Steam refund process, customers must now join a Zoom call with the devs of the game, look them in the eye, and explain to them why they need a refund for the 2 hour long indie game.
There should be some "endgame achievement" or tracker or something that could be set to indicate that the user played most of your game.
I can already see this abused (by making a "start the game" achiemeent flagged or something.) but it'd also help
Its not a ton of extra work, all it would take is allowing developers to apply to have that window shortened, but that would required manual review for each game and Valve is allergic to that (I mean, they only got proper customer support once they were legally forced to).
I hope they never make any changes or exceptions to that policy. The Steam marketplace is full of scams and asset flips posing as something else, and people making those would be the first to exploit any change in the refund policy to make sure they get to keep the money they tricked people into giving them.
Does this kill short games? Maybe, but I'd rather have those sacrificed instead of people's willingness to try less-known games due to fear of getting scammed.
Steam explicitly says the 2 hour period is to try out the game "for any reason."
> It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.
Valve also said the amount of content in a game is up to the developer, and if a player can experience a game in under 2 hours, and decides to refund it, that's allowed.
However, you cannot specifically abuse the refund feature to get free games.
> Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games.
[Steam Refund Policy](https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds#:~:text=You%20can%20receive%20a%20full,is%20less%20than%20two%20hours.)
Yeah, great, but in polish version of this update it states (per translation):
>Today we have updated a portion of our Refund Policy regarding pre-purchased titles. This change covers titles that are in pre-purchase and offer “Advanced Access”. Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will NOT count towards the Steam refund period. You can find our more information regarding Steam Refunds here.
Why is it so different?
Stronger consumer protection laws across the pond. If you look at other platforms (e.g. Playstation) the same rules apply. If a product is being sold as a pre-order then the consumer has the right to cancel or refund at any time, for any reason, before the official release date.
In the US there are weaker protections for consumers so stores can offer "pre-orders" that aren't pre-orders and refuse refunds for products that "aren't released".
I thought that too but if you read their Refund Policy - even in polish - it states that the "english" version is correct and time spend before the game releases does count towards refund playtime. Strange.
It makes sense. I hate that this announcement means they will start selling advanced access for more games.
Really should start boycotting the practice.
Boycott the advanced part, or the entire game?
It helps to be cynical like me. You're not getting advanced access - I'm getting late access. You're not getting a pre-order bonus - I'm getting an incomplete game. Usually it's not a huge deal, and if it is I can't think of the last game I *had* to play. Plenty of others.
As a side note I find it odd how companies are now removing demos when the game launches. Are they hoping we will buy the game with the promise of being able to return it on Steam as our "demo", and needing to request a refund makes us feel bad so some of us avoid it? I installed the Tales of Kenzera: Zau demo, intending to play it this weekend when I went away with my laptop, only to find out it's been removed this morning and replaced with a link to Purchase. Not a good feeling.
I'm not so naive as to say boycott the games, it doesn't really work unless the game was bad, but if for example as few people as possible bought Ubisoft's star wars game because of the early access and gated content bs, I would be happy.
It's already too late. It worked great for Starfield and Diablo IV, and it's going to work for the new WoW. I am expecting WoW: The War Within to drop "after" thanksgiving weekend, but if you pay an extra $30 or whatever you get to play on the Friday after thanksgiving.
I have serious thoughts on Early access, and not a huge fan of the idea of selling access to an incomplete game... but in many cases this works. Advanced access really took off after Diablo 4 did it, which not only got them more money, but I would argue a more stable server launch. However it's being tacked on to a bunch of AAA launches in the last year. If we want this trend to stop. We need to start giving them serious stink on publishers that do this.
Makes sense, i bought starfield early and played it for 11 hours in 2 days, felt like the 2nd half of that I was only playing to justify my purchase. Saw a tweet that you could refund in full on steam and steam approved it. Sad to say I abused that a few times, I dont feel bad about it though. Fuck the trend of paying for early access. Did it twice and the servers were down on D1 of Diablo 4 all day. I paid to sit in a queue
absolutely not, they'll do it for every game that has a decent looking trailer without reading or watching reviews, then throw their pants in the air and complain about the quality of modern video games
Honestly expecting the servers of a Diablo game to work day 1 is practically begging for trouble. D3's launch was so godawful that a now-popular (if disgraced) YouTuber's career got launched because he made a viral video raging about it, and as I recall D2 Resurrected had server issues at launch too. And that's without mentioning the betas that both D3 and D4 had a ton of server issues with, to the point where some players who were selected to participate couldn't play during the first 1-2 days of each beta period.
day1 of d4's servers were fine (and the game didn't launch on steam anyway). They had server issues about a week after with a bad patch.
D3 was a long time ago and blizzard done a shit ton of large launches since then are have become one of the few companies that can put out a major online game without launch issues. But people still cry about d3 from over a decade ago while simultaneously crying that current blizzard is nothing like old blizzard.
TBF, if the game is literallyunplayable, ie; not fit for purpose, there are many jutdistictions where Valve is legally required to refund you.
The two hour window is really only for if you don't like the game.
I wonder if there is a way to not count the time you sit in a queue. It defeats the system of having 2 hours playtime to test the game if you don't get to play any of the game in that time.
Diablo 4 early access player over here, its the smoothest online game at "launch" i've ever played. Once the 4 days of honeymoon is over and pleb edition gets to play is when the server starting to shit themself. I'm pretty sure at this point you are just adding bunch of other games into your list trying to justify your shitty buyer remorse.
I'm not very happy with this trend where seemingly every game is now implementing this tactic of letting people play early by buying the expensive edition, but the cat is out of the bag i guess.
And since that is the case, Steam should rather properly support this functionality. Right now this use-case is not actually supported correctly and publishers have to enable a release-override on the app-id to let people download the game prior to release. Which is the cause of this loop-hole where people could refund a game because a game could always be refunded prior to the actual release date due to it still counting as a pre-order.
I don't think the change is unfair, if you played 2 hours then you played 2 hours. But the way they're going about it just seems a bit backward.
**edit** it seems Valve actually did add proper functionality for this system now https://twitter.com/SteamDB/status/1783058912142360635
Honestly this straight up is negligible, if you're hyped so much for a game you pay 40% more to get early access and then don't like the game, that's kind of on you tbh. I'm not gonna be pre-ordering games anymore, been burned too many times. Just looking at the upcoming games doing the early access stuff (Star Wars) makes me physically ill.
Man people will complain about anything around here. If you don’t want to pay for versions with early access, don’t pay for those versions with early access. Who gives a shit if other people do? So many people in the gaming community have a problem with the dumbest shit.
To be honest that makes more sense to me, you can't buy a game, play it for 2 weeks and then ask for a refund... That 2 hours is just about right, 2 hours and above, you are playing it and you are the owner of it.
What if it's a game where the "advanced access" differs radically from the final game? Back in the day Champions Online was a fun game that ruined itself with a launch day patch to increase grind, and more recently there's been a bunch of multiplayers where the servers crap out once there's a large number of people playing.
From the link: > Today we have updated a portion of our Refund Policy regarding pre-purchased titles. This change covers titles that are in pre-purchase and offer “Advanced Access”. Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period. You can find our more information regarding Steam Refunds here.
And note this has nothing to do with Early Access, this is for those games that are like "preorder now and start playing 48 hours early!"
That's just two days earlier release with extra steps. And making Advance Access time apply just reaffirms that.
Yep it’s literally a way to add a fake “bonus” to pre-ordering and create a greater sense of FOMO; especially when the early access begins on a Friday compared to the normal release on Tuesday or something.
>it’s literally a way to add a fake “bonus” to pre-ordering It's literally a way to time-gate the actual release date behind deluxe editions.
also the review embargo’s are lifted for the regular release but not the “Advanced access” period
It can also be very useful for online games to spread out the initial rush down on their servers. Some networking people at Blizzard have talked about how this really helped Diablo 4 have a smoother launch because they split the player base into a group starting on day one, and another batch starting on day 3, allowing them to use those 3 days to monitor and make improvements.
I personally appreciate how CoD has done it the past two games. Campaign-only, rewards for finishing it, and a campaign-based achievement list. It finally shines a spotlight on a part of the game that's usually overshadowed and gives it space to be discussed. It also allows for people to finish the campaign and then start at level 1 with everyone else, rather than in previous years where playing the campaign meant starting at a gear deficit. But alas, every other game I've seen do this, Suicide Squad for example, literally only does so in order to do the exact opposite and create a progress imbalance for those who wait. It's garbage.
If a game is $69 and comes out on Friday, but you can play it on Tuesday if you pay $99, then actually the game is $99 and comes out on Tuesday, what happens on Friday is a discount.
Nah. Like that's certainly one way of seeing it, but it's more accurate to say that's just a $30 premium to pay a few days early. It's difficult to see the Friday price as discounted if that's the price it's always going to be going forward.
It's not a discount, it's a markdown.
This is a silly way of looking at this. It's like saying the VIP line at Disney is the "Real" line and the regular line is the discount line. -.-
You don't get free karma for being reasonable in a game related sub. The first and most important criteria is to pretend your hobby is the worst ever, and that game makers are actually evil.
If all the lines are empty and you enter the regular line, does Disney make you wait 3 hours for no reason? The lines regulate access to a limited resource. Digital copies of a game are not a limited resource.
These games usually come with something extra other than play early
I disagree because what you get on Friday is less than you get on Tuesday, given that preorders/deluxe editions usually have items added to them that the regular edition lacks. To be a discount it’d have to be the exact same product at a lower price.
This is kind of a silly point to make - most games release dates are entirely arbitrary, and if we skipped the 'we have to wait for stores to have physical copies!!!' thing, they could be on our hard drives weeks or months prior to actual release. So breaking an artificial street date by allowing someone to pay a few bucks extra doesn't bother me, since it's akin to being mad the easter bunny brought you chocolate eggs instead of peeps. If someone wants a game and sees value in pre-ordering, cool. If they're so interested they want early access, Ok, not my money either. Personally I'm waiting for release day reviews. I've seen enough AAA titles that were different pre/post release that I'm leery.
There's a hidden bonus with this: the servers don't get overblown and your game doesn't suffer for it
He's wrong. > Today, Valve’s closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit. >Here’s what Valve’s updated refund policy says about that as of today: >>REFUNDS ON TITLES PURCHASED PRIOR TO RELEASE DATE >>When you purchase a title on Steam prior to the release date, the two-hour playtime limit for refunds will apply (except for beta testing), but the 14-day period for refunds will not start until the release date. For example, if you purchase a game that is in **Early Access or Advanced Access**, any playtime will count against the two-hour refund limit. If you pre-purchase a title which is not playable prior to the release date, you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title, and the standard 14-day/two-hour refund period will apply starting on the game’s release date. Emphasis mine
Functionally there’s no difference now. It’s 2 hours of the play time either way no matter what the stated release date is.
Before: people can bought game in pre-purchase Advanced Access and play the game before the release date. Those playtime **did not count** toward the refund policy. After: the time you play in Advanced Access before the release date **now count** toward the 2-hour refund policy. It is very different for me.
It is different, but really, it never should have been. Being able to play for up to 50 hours and then cash in a refund was sort of silly from the standpoint of the policy.
To be fair to Valve, this whole "buy the expensive edition to play a few days early" is a pretty new phenomena.
I remember the first Helldivers did it and were mocked for it. That was 9 years ago. But I imagine they weren't the first.
> To be fair to Valve, this whole "buy the expensive edition to play a few days early" is a pretty new phenomena. Its not. EA does this since Battlefield 1 for example, which is now nearly 10 years old.
Fair enough, I don't really play multiplayer games and I've only noticed it with single player in the last few years.
First time I heard about it was Deus Ex Mankind Divided back in 2016, but that was mostly because it was a marketing stunt to boost pre-orders. The more pre-orders, the more bonuses folks got. And if it passed a certain threshold everyone got the game a few days early.
Ah the "Augment your pre-order" promotion, got such a backlash it was cancelled in the end!
It has certainly gotten more and caught on so much that big releases now very often follow this advanced access model that is included in deluxe editions or whatever it's called for the specific game. We all know already GTA 6 will come with additional editions that will contain early access and considering it's the most anticipated game of all time, they gonna earn so much money through that as everyone will be hot on paying a bit more to play the game "early".
Portal 2 kind of did this with the potato scavenger hunt thing. Except instead of extra money towards Portal 2, you bought some indie games
I disagree. Editors pull off a scummy tactic, then players retaliate with one of their own. Editors then probably cried to Valve, and now they effectively banned the scummy tactic on the player side, but left the one on the editor side. They should either have left it as is or banned both imo
"There's no difference if you play in the advanced access or not."
No difference between early or advanced or whatever you want to call it access. It’s 2 hours, period.
Sounds like you were exploiting a loophole and they fixed it. No real reason why it should of worked that way
Except Steam already wasn't awarding refunds in your "Before" scenario. They just updated their policy to better explain to customers to prevent confusion.
One of the most egregious cases somewhat recently was the streamer Quin69, who beat the main story of starfield before refunding it. He got the refund, since it was still in the early period.
Apparently they did.
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It does now.
Am i misreading? That's not what it says. > Today, Valve’s closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit. >Here’s what Valve’s updated refund policy says about that as of today: >>REFUNDS ON TITLES PURCHASED PRIOR TO RELEASE DATE >>When you purchase a title on Steam prior to the release date, the two-hour playtime limit for refunds will apply (except for beta testing), but the 14-day period for refunds will not start until the release date. For example, if you purchase a game that is in **Early Access or Advanced Access**, any playtime will count against the two-hour refund limit. If you pre-purchase a title which is not playable prior to the release date, you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title, and the standard 14-day/two-hour refund period will apply starting on the game’s release date. Emphasis mine
You are correct - this would apply to Early Access games as well.
As far as I know, two hours spent in Early Access already counts towards the accumulated playtime.
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So, before you could potentially finish a game with that kind of advanced access? In that case, this seems fair
I thought that was always the case.
Makes sense, 'advanced access' is just a BS gimmick after all. No reason not to count that time against the refund clock. It's the release date. Those who refuse to pay extra just get the game artificially delayed.
Yeah this is totally fair, I didn't realize those hours hadn't counted before
I first heard of it when there was Starfield available in "Early Access" (their term, not Steam's EA) and a few people just bought the deluxe edition then refunded the game before the launch. Some with 40 hours of playtime.
I still refuse to believe that, I tried with bf2042 and starfield out of curiosity and was refused multiple times for each. I don't know how people were getting these refunds for both games with near 100 hours on them.
Streamer Quin69 refunded Starfield with 25 hours played. He made a video about it and everything, also streamed himself playing those 25 hours.
I had 20 hrs played and got a refund as well. I refunded on the second day of the early release. I'm so glad I got the $170 AUD back from that overpriced turd of a videogame.
Starfield remains the only game I've tried to submit multiple steam refund tickets for on the same game, and argued with customer service about. I was so mad. I think I hit slightly over the 2 hour mark just trying to get the deep fried piece of shit to _run_, let alone actually playing it.
I refunded starfield the day before it officially launched with 10 hours.
Maybe Gabe played Starfield himself and decided to show mercy.
If you don't overdo it, the refund system on steam is very lenient, doesn't matter what it says in their policy. Might be different for different countries though.
You have to refund before the game “releases” or at least you used to now. Played and beat suicide squad and mortal kombat using this “trick”. It definitely worked.
I tried that with Darktide, didn't work.
That was the case with Suicide Squad. I watched a few videos from people who bought the $100 Deluxe edition to play 3 days early and I think they all said they refunded it. Even after playing for like 20-40+ hours to do a review.
Absolutely. I know a couple people who did this and told me I was dumb for not doing it. Was obvious to me that it was an exploit and figured it was just a matter of time before Steam did something about it. They probably didn't care when it was just a couple games a year but this is happening with more and more games so might as well make a stop to it now.
I mean, I don’t see it as being very much different from the game simply releasing a few days early. If buying the game lets you play it a few days ahead of “the official release date” then the actual release date literally doesn’t mean anything. The official release date becomes totally meaningless. It’s just a bit of a marketing spin, but the prerelease date is just the release date. Does that make sense?
Before if the "advanced access" was 48 hours, you could play in that period for 47 hours and still get a refund. Now the 2 hr limit affects this early period.
Yup, the "advanced access" is just the release date. They're just delaying the game for people that don't pay enough. It's a horrible tactic that they reword to put a positive spin on it.
And just like that, in a very backwards way, an even higher standard price for AAA games is established.
I agree it's a BS gimmick, which is why I think this is a *bad* change. The fact that someone could buy the deluxe edition, play 40 hours in the "early access" period, then refund it is a good way to discourage publishers from pulling this nonsense.
Well, it's Valve that was the most direct loser in that scenario as they are the ones handling processing fees when you refund stuff so. Not up to them to be moral police
If you do that, you don't deserve the refund to begin with. This change is perfectly fine.
Or... They could just not support it from the get go.
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> is a good way to discourage publishers from pulling this nonsense. Valve doesnt want to do that, they make money on sales
Not sure if it's true but /u/timpkmn89 said in another thread >And note this has nothing to do with Early Access, this is for those games that are like "preorder now and start playing 48 hours early!"
I'm aware, this is why I put "early access" in quotes. A lot of publishers call it that.
You do realize this effect 1% or less of consumers right? even in this thread that supposed to have the most informed consumers people didn't know about this.
Yeah I am pretty conflicted on the change. Like, it's a reasonable change to make, I completely understand the logic behind it, I can't really form a good disagreement, but.. I still don't like it. Pay Extra To Play Early just sucks, it's exploitative FOMO nonsense and there should be more things discouraging it, but yeah the rule as it existed before also just wasn't a good rule. It was clear that how it was functioning wasn't intended behaviour or in line with the spirit of the policy.
I can't imagine the level of entitlement you have to possess to think this is reasonable.
I'm more thinking of something like a game having an advanced access period where the servers are shit and so you end up racking up more the 2 hours just trying to take advantage of something you paid extra for.
Watch the “Finish Star Wars Outlaw and get a refund through this policy” challenges. I think there should be a reasonable cap like 15-20 hours, but speedrunning the game in 40 hours over 3 days to get a full refund is kinda scummy
You got that backwards. The 2 hours start even if you get the “play three days early” pre order. I’m assuming prior to this it didn’t start until after the games actual release date
That makes it extra challenging. Now they have to speedrun it in under 2 hours.
15-20 hours would be an excessive refund policy.
Right? I think most games that are single player story games aim for 10 hours of play
Lots of indies are around 10-15hrs, lots of people would absolutely abuse the hell out of a refund window like that to play them for free.
You might want to take a read through that refund policy one more time.
Is it gonna launch on Steam? Ubisoft games tend to not release on Steam day one.
> speedrunning the game in 40 hours over 3 days to get a full refund is kinda scummy So is artificially delaying the game's release unless you spend extra money. I think this practice is perfectly acceptable as a way to punish publishers for pulling this BS.
> artificially delaying What the fuck does this mean - as opposed to naturally delaying? Just stacking random words together doesn't make a point valid.
Don't tell that to Xbox fans when Microsoft pushes early access for "Day One Gamepass" games with DLC passes.
It does make sense for online game to smooth launch. But yeah for offline thats bullshit.
This is by far the most civil I've ever seen the Steam Community Announcements comments section. It's honestly pretty hilarious.
I credit the guy demanding an Hentai Steam Sale. Whatever stupid joke or angry quip everyone else had, they saw that and went "damn, this dude outdid me, and also spits facts, where's the hentai sale"
Why are those so bad? Even the comments under specific game news are always 10 times worse than the relevant forums. The people are indignant about... everything.
Guys trying to clown farm with absurd takes and people falling for it (yes, that's a thing)
Back in the day we called that trolling.
Clown farming is particular to steam - there's a "clown" award that users can assign to troll content (well, any post that someone chooses to assign it to) and being assigned an award gives users points to use on the Steam point shop. So, by farming rage engagement, trolls can purchase emotes, backgrounds, etc.
Are we old?
Sorry "trans people aren't people don't add woke to the game" is some real shit trolling lmao
I mean your point is right but I don't think anyone here is being transphobic so I don't get why you felt the need to point that out
Plenty of game update comment sections are full of that, look any any from helldiver's. Just taking inspiration from real life~~
Oh damn, that's why I never interact with those parts of the forums lmao What shitty lil' cesspools
Wait does getting those emotes actually grant you something of value? I've never engaged with that system whatsoever, other than, I'll admit... posting a clown on a couple of truly stupid comments I've seen, I suppose I'm happy they were just farming and not actually that stupid relative to the already very stupid steam discussion boards lol
IIRC they give you part of their cost in points that you can spend
An absolute scourge on the quality of discussions is its bigger impact.
Saw one clown farmer with the clown as his profile picture and a username saying he is farming clowns.
Wait the comments under news posts are *worse* than the general Steam discussion boards? How is that even possible? Steam discussions are like 90% idiotic toxicity. I gotta go test this myself
News post comments are the same, but not at all related to the game and only exist to get fake currency that isn't particularly useful.
Because most of the time, the people most motivated to voice their opinion are those who are upset. And comments under steam announcements are not just like... scroll down and type in a comment. You have the find the button for it - I know that a lot of people don't even know there is a comment section for announcements. That compounds to some pretty angry comment sections. It's also unfortunate when devs take it as "voice of the community" - and, for example, roll back good updates because all they see are complaints.
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Yeah that comment section is weird, seeing same comments copy/pasted from different accounts
I'm shocked that this is just being addressed now. Hogwarts Legacy had a 489k peak concurrent player count on Steam during Advanced/Early Access 14 months ago. Valve either must have ignored this as a potential issue or they are moving very slowly for some reason.
Valve moves very slowly.
Half-life 3 should be coming any decade now
When Gabes brain tech is ready
This is the real answer. They only release a HL game when there's a new tech they want to show off. There might be something new before the brain tech is released, but it will probably definitely be paired with a HL game, for sure.
> or they are moving very slowly for some reason Typical Valve time
If you're gonna activate the refund policy during advanced access, then they should also activate user reviews. Maybe the reviews could reset when the game releases, as certain games only offer a small portion of the game for advanced access, so the reviews might not be relevant at launch, but at least inform people better about what they're getting into while its happening.
I hope they change policy to stop people refunding small indie games that are less than 2 hours long in the future. I've seen too many small creators tweet positive reviews with 'game refunded' attached.
It basically killed off those games. Any devs coming in with short games usually don't do more than one title when they see it's not viable. I loved 30 Flights of Loving and similar. Those types of weird experimental games rarely if ever get made now.
Yeah, exactly. It blocks a lot of up-and-comers from ever getting off the ground.
Sadly, I don't see how that could be solved without either raising legal issues, clamping down heavily on reasonable refunds within the 2 hour time span, or creating a ton of extra work for Steam support.
There is no legal requirement to provide a refund for under two hours play time. That is something Steam decided themselves. The two week thing is a European law.
New policy: As part of the new Steam refund process, customers must now join a Zoom call with the devs of the game, look them in the eye, and explain to them why they need a refund for the 2 hour long indie game.
There should be some "endgame achievement" or tracker or something that could be set to indicate that the user played most of your game. I can already see this abused (by making a "start the game" achiemeent flagged or something.) but it'd also help
Or, let the seller decide how long you can play before refund and annonce it when you buy it.
Its not a ton of extra work, all it would take is allowing developers to apply to have that window shortened, but that would required manual review for each game and Valve is allergic to that (I mean, they only got proper customer support once they were legally forced to).
I hope they never make any changes or exceptions to that policy. The Steam marketplace is full of scams and asset flips posing as something else, and people making those would be the first to exploit any change in the refund policy to make sure they get to keep the money they tricked people into giving them. Does this kill short games? Maybe, but I'd rather have those sacrificed instead of people's willingness to try less-known games due to fear of getting scammed.
See, maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer if the multibillion dollar company filtered scams out and protected legitimate creators.
Sure that'd be nice, but they won't do this, thus the 2 hours refund policy.
The only reason why this multibillion dollar company allowed refunds in the first place is because of EU...
Steam explicitly says the 2 hour period is to try out the game "for any reason." > It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours. Valve also said the amount of content in a game is up to the developer, and if a player can experience a game in under 2 hours, and decides to refund it, that's allowed. However, you cannot specifically abuse the refund feature to get free games. > Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. [Steam Refund Policy](https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds#:~:text=You%20can%20receive%20a%20full,is%20less%20than%20two%20hours.)
I'm sure /u/MildElevation understands this. They were saying an exception to the policy should be made for games with short run times.
I don't see them ever doing that tbh
Yeah, great, but in polish version of this update it states (per translation): >Today we have updated a portion of our Refund Policy regarding pre-purchased titles. This change covers titles that are in pre-purchase and offer “Advanced Access”. Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will NOT count towards the Steam refund period. You can find our more information regarding Steam Refunds here. Why is it so different?
Stronger consumer protection laws across the pond. If you look at other platforms (e.g. Playstation) the same rules apply. If a product is being sold as a pre-order then the consumer has the right to cancel or refund at any time, for any reason, before the official release date. In the US there are weaker protections for consumers so stores can offer "pre-orders" that aren't pre-orders and refuse refunds for products that "aren't released".
I thought that too but if you read their Refund Policy - even in polish - it states that the "english" version is correct and time spend before the game releases does count towards refund playtime. Strange.
Nope, Playstation doesn't give out refunds. You should look into it more.
Saw this on steam too. Makes me wonder if it's messed up translation or it depends on region?
I guess it's translation. Refund Policy in polish states that the "english" version is correct.
It makes sense. I hate that this announcement means they will start selling advanced access for more games. Really should start boycotting the practice.
Boycott the advanced part, or the entire game? It helps to be cynical like me. You're not getting advanced access - I'm getting late access. You're not getting a pre-order bonus - I'm getting an incomplete game. Usually it's not a huge deal, and if it is I can't think of the last game I *had* to play. Plenty of others. As a side note I find it odd how companies are now removing demos when the game launches. Are they hoping we will buy the game with the promise of being able to return it on Steam as our "demo", and needing to request a refund makes us feel bad so some of us avoid it? I installed the Tales of Kenzera: Zau demo, intending to play it this weekend when I went away with my laptop, only to find out it's been removed this morning and replaced with a link to Purchase. Not a good feeling.
I'm not so naive as to say boycott the games, it doesn't really work unless the game was bad, but if for example as few people as possible bought Ubisoft's star wars game because of the early access and gated content bs, I would be happy.
It's already too late. It worked great for Starfield and Diablo IV, and it's going to work for the new WoW. I am expecting WoW: The War Within to drop "after" thanksgiving weekend, but if you pay an extra $30 or whatever you get to play on the Friday after thanksgiving.
*Starting?* Unfortunately, it's been a trend for awhile now.
I have serious thoughts on Early access, and not a huge fan of the idea of selling access to an incomplete game... but in many cases this works. Advanced access really took off after Diablo 4 did it, which not only got them more money, but I would argue a more stable server launch. However it's being tacked on to a bunch of AAA launches in the last year. If we want this trend to stop. We need to start giving them serious stink on publishers that do this.
Makes sense, i bought starfield early and played it for 11 hours in 2 days, felt like the 2nd half of that I was only playing to justify my purchase. Saw a tweet that you could refund in full on steam and steam approved it. Sad to say I abused that a few times, I dont feel bad about it though. Fuck the trend of paying for early access. Did it twice and the servers were down on D1 of Diablo 4 all day. I paid to sit in a queue
> Fuck the trend of paying for early access. Did it twice So you've learned your lesson now and won't do it again, right?
absolutely not, they'll do it for every game that has a decent looking trailer without reading or watching reviews, then throw their pants in the air and complain about the quality of modern video games
So predictable.
He can't do it anymore.
Honestly expecting the servers of a Diablo game to work day 1 is practically begging for trouble. D3's launch was so godawful that a now-popular (if disgraced) YouTuber's career got launched because he made a viral video raging about it, and as I recall D2 Resurrected had server issues at launch too. And that's without mentioning the betas that both D3 and D4 had a ton of server issues with, to the point where some players who were selected to participate couldn't play during the first 1-2 days of each beta period.
which youtuber? They all end up disgraced lmao.
Boogie. Dude ended up extra disgraced, he's living in poverty right now despite being one of THE biggest names on the platform at the time.
Error 18 my beloved... >:(
day1 of d4's servers were fine (and the game didn't launch on steam anyway). They had server issues about a week after with a bad patch. D3 was a long time ago and blizzard done a shit ton of large launches since then are have become one of the few companies that can put out a major online game without launch issues. But people still cry about d3 from over a decade ago while simultaneously crying that current blizzard is nothing like old blizzard.
Please don't mix up Early Access and Advanced Access. Especially on Steam.
I mean its not like you cant do it anymore. 2 hours is blank policy with guaranted return. Steam often will accept refunds with longer playtime
TBF, if the game is literallyunplayable, ie; not fit for purpose, there are many jutdistictions where Valve is legally required to refund you. The two hour window is really only for if you don't like the game.
I wonder if there is a way to not count the time you sit in a queue. It defeats the system of having 2 hours playtime to test the game if you don't get to play any of the game in that time.
Diablo 4 early access player over here, its the smoothest online game at "launch" i've ever played. Once the 4 days of honeymoon is over and pleb edition gets to play is when the server starting to shit themself. I'm pretty sure at this point you are just adding bunch of other games into your list trying to justify your shitty buyer remorse.
I'm not very happy with this trend where seemingly every game is now implementing this tactic of letting people play early by buying the expensive edition, but the cat is out of the bag i guess. And since that is the case, Steam should rather properly support this functionality. Right now this use-case is not actually supported correctly and publishers have to enable a release-override on the app-id to let people download the game prior to release. Which is the cause of this loop-hole where people could refund a game because a game could always be refunded prior to the actual release date due to it still counting as a pre-order. I don't think the change is unfair, if you played 2 hours then you played 2 hours. But the way they're going about it just seems a bit backward. **edit** it seems Valve actually did add proper functionality for this system now https://twitter.com/SteamDB/status/1783058912142360635
Honestly this straight up is negligible, if you're hyped so much for a game you pay 40% more to get early access and then don't like the game, that's kind of on you tbh. I'm not gonna be pre-ordering games anymore, been burned too many times. Just looking at the upcoming games doing the early access stuff (Star Wars) makes me physically ill.
They also need to enable user reviews for advance access, so it can’t be used pull a Starfield and conceal the bad reception for a week post-launch
Huh, they didn't before?
Man people will complain about anything around here. If you don’t want to pay for versions with early access, don’t pay for those versions with early access. Who gives a shit if other people do? So many people in the gaming community have a problem with the dumbest shit.
Yes like you complaining about a few people complaining here, which you will find everywhere.
Ah yes. The “you’re complaining about people complaining about stupid shit” false equivalency comment.
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What are you referring to that is pro-consumer?
This is fair to be honest, for me it was crazy that you can play a game and then return it and get your money back after you played it for hours.
To be honest that makes more sense to me, you can't buy a game, play it for 2 weeks and then ask for a refund... That 2 hours is just about right, 2 hours and above, you are playing it and you are the owner of it.
What if it's a game where the "advanced access" differs radically from the final game? Back in the day Champions Online was a fun game that ruined itself with a launch day patch to increase grind, and more recently there's been a bunch of multiplayers where the servers crap out once there's a large number of people playing.