Trouble between Steam Users and Indie devs due to refund policy

FreddyZVoorhees · Jun 8, 2015

It seems that the new Steam refund policy will harm the indie developers more than they thought originally. Today, Qwiboo and Puppygames shared some charts showing decline in sales due to the new policy of Steam. It is still early to say anything, but by what it seems, the new refund policy allows players to play and test a lot of free games.

On the one hand, this is not a bad thing. In the past, we received a lot of demos. Today, game demos can be really counted on the fingers of one hand. Okay, okay, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea. Thanks to Steam and your new refund policy, players can test and see if a game is worth your time.

On the other hand, this new policy will hurt indie developers. You see, some players are very greedy and will take advantage of this new policy. That's the saddest thing about this whole story.

Take for example Qwiboo. This indie developer released on Steam "Beyond Gravity"; a generated procedurally platform game where you jump between planets and try to collect as many pieces as you can. The game costs $ 1.99 and has been on Steam for nearly nine months. During this time, the game received a lot of positive reviews and comments. And that's what happened when Valve announced new policy Steam refunds:

As Qwiboo tweeted of 18 sales, 13 were repaid in last 3 days. This has never happened before, as he noted.

Qwiboo agree that refunds should be available, however, this new policy is being abused by a lot of players. And while it might not even hurt the AAA games that last 10-20 hours, it's OK to indie developers. Qwiboo also provided another chart, proving that next Summer Sale Steam should not be blamed for these low sales.

And Qwiboo is not the only indie developer who suffers from this exploitation. Puppygames also shared a similar graph for sales. As we can see clearly, sales plummeted after the announcement of the new refund policy Steam.

Still we wait to see how Valve will react to exploitation of Steam refund policy. In its current state, players can enjoy indie games for free.

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