Refund Me If You Can challenges you to beat it in under 2 hours
Steam’s refund window causing laughs, rather than woes, for once.
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One clever indie dev has made quite the piece of statement art about Steam’s refund policies:Refund Me If You Can.It’s a horror game where you’ve got to find your way through a maze-like sewer while pursued by a monster. The trick here is that it’s hard enough that it might take you more than two hours to figure out your escape: Which means that beating the game would take you past Steam’s refund window. (If you don’t already know, here’s howSteam Refunds work.)
It’s an odd, clever, meta-textual bit of game design. If I beat the game in less than two hours, is it now ethical to refund it? If I don’t beat it, but refund it inside that two hour window anyway, am I breaking some kind of implicit pact with not just the developer, but myself?
To many developers, users refunding games they’ve beaten deeply discourages someone from making a game that takes less than two hours to play. Last year, a developer made a publicdeparture from games entirelydue to the large number of refunds on their game. There’s also that time a developerpublicly shamedsomeone who left a positive review into re-buying their game.
Suffice to say, Steam’s two hour refund window has been a source of weird troubles over the years. Not just for indies, either: There are also mundane problems like MS Flight Simulator taking so long to download that itblew past the two hour window.
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he’s not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.
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