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 how Steam 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 public departure from games entirely due to the large number of refunds on their game. There's also that time a developer publicly shamed someone who left a positive review into re-buying their game.
- Steam reviewers finally trolled me: I bought a game they called 'calm' and 'relaxing' before I noticed those were the 'funny' reviews
- 'A big scam company just stole my whole game': A Backrooms indie dev has been forced to seek legal help after someone took their game off Steam and uploaded it to the Nintendo Store
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 it blew past the two hour window.
