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.

I kinda love short games, I don't have time to put 100 hours in every game I buy. I bought this game in part because it seemed like a bit of silly fun, and was priced appropriately.

it is for sure bad taste, to refund a game you enjoyed. but it can't be solved. adjusting time windows will only shift the problem...

however, i do not think this is a problem which needs solving. while it enables some frustration, i am pretty sure this feature makes more money than it looses: because players have this relatively generous refund model, they can take a risk in what they buy. that way players can properly test drive the games they buy and keep the ones which actually strike their fancy.

if that policy would not exist, i think many purchases just would not be made in the first place. especially in this economy.

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.

Feels like a tough problem to solve, but I don't think it's unsolvable. Maybe the refund window could be shorter for games that report themselves as short/small/micro/whatever. Or ineligible for automatic refunds if you have a certain achievement (this one probably is not a good idea).

it isn't a loophole if it is working as intended and the original headline doesn't say that

also he claims 270k sold and 55k refunded but the game has been out for just under a year and steamdb shows an all-time peak of 401 players?

https://steamdb.info/app/3570070/charts/

edit: might have been a bit harsh, the owner estimates range 160-200k

If someone doesn't want to pay for your game they would just pirate it.

I get that's a disappointment for the publisher seeing a sale and then seeing that sale dissapear. But AFAIK they do not have to do anything, Steam manages the refund for them, so it's harmless.

No matter how well you try to adjust the window, I could just copy the game files in my computer, apply the crack if needed and be done with it. I could ask for a refund after just one minute if I wanted. So my advice would be, don't worry about it. You will be paid, as always, by people who appreciate your work and want to give money to you, and, as always, some people will play your game for free.

I guess he should have checked to see how quickly one could beat the game before listing it for sale.

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.

My friend is an indie game developer and he once told me the typical refund rate, which I think was only a little lower than this. I don't think the game length is playing that large a role here, rather people use that refund policy as a way to try out a game (like a demo). Probably most of the people who refunded wouldn't have bought it in the first place without that refund policy, so he shouldn't really view this as "because of this policy I lost 55K sales".

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one. The developer mentions the idea of having "expected time to complete" featured on the Steam Store page, and using that as an exception for 2 hour refund periods. But he also says he intended this Paddle game to be between 3-4 hours long. He was already aware of the problem of short games on Steam, made efforts to avoid it, and still missed the mark. By his own admission, his game would not meet his own recommended refund exception.

He also blames speed runners as a general player type that is causing this abuse, but the way he speaks of them sounds like he is implying that it is a concentrated community effort. Now, I haven't checked speed running community discussions or watched any YouTuber's talk about this game. I could imagine some not so well thought out "influencer" talking about this games short run time, and their audience turning it into a novel blind speed run challenge. That would hypothetically be some real shit head behavior, and the best course of action would be for speed running communities to take some moderation action against people who post their times but refund/remove the game from their libraries.

But I don't think Valve should change their refund policy over this. There are games with much shorter completion run times that don't get refunded. Including linear, narrative focused games comparable to Paddle Paddle Paddle. The developer even mentions that despite the large amount of refunds, this game got a much larger reception and net profit than other titles. Its an easy assumption to make that the social advertising of being a gimmicky speed run caused its financial success. 1/4th of the sales are refunded, but the total sales dwarf many of the countless indie titles that drown at launch.

Idk. I can think of 10 games in my library off the top of my head, that I completed in less than 2 hours but didn't feel like refunding. "They beat my game and still refunded it" isn't a valid problem to the no questions asked refund policy. People get refunds for things besides games for much less time and more money spent. Hell, it doesn't even seem like he has any negative consequences to these refunds! The game is at positive reviews, its not algorithmicly being suppressed over the refunds, he's making the same "ratio" of profit as he would without the refunds; what is the actual problem here???

Damn they all forgot the lesson to only fuck over the big corpos 😞

Can't wait for this legitimate gripe to be the thing Valve uses to axe this policy!

/s in case this was somehow confusing

idk guy, the 2 hours isn't that long. if your game is only a few hours im not sure what your buisness plan was here, sorry.