I hate to say it, but the business model always affects the game design. The “meta” is to make a game that’s longer than 2 hours if you want to avoid this, or that the player otherwise won’t want to part with after that 2 hours is up.
A tale as old as time. There’s people who buy clothing for a wedding or some other event, for example, and then refund it since you have a 14 day refund window in europe (or at least the DACH area) for basically anything you buy. Companies like zalando have a global 50% return rate across everything they sell.
Sadge, but you can’t make everyone happy. Overall, I’d argue that the 2 hour return policy for steam is overall more of a benefit to consumers than it is a detriment for developers. And then again, you can always add a bit more content to the game to make it longer.
It would be good to know the refund rate on other games before deciding if this is a problem specific to short games. Maybe that 90% positive review would have been much, much lower if people couldn’t get refunds. A $5 game with 70% reviews is not getting 250,000 sales.
For a lot of people there needs to be a certain amount of perceived value per dollar. The article said the game is $5 full price. If I spent $5 and beat it in under 2 hours, I’d refund it too.
If it’s good enough that I finished it I’m gonna let the creator keep the money (and pay close attention to the reviews next time, because I agree that less than 2 hours is a little short for that amount of entertainment) and make myself feel better by treating it like a donation to a good cause.
