I've been reading a lot of 'Refund Messages' lately and... it's terrible

#1

People give horribly conflicting reports on why they refunded their game. The Epic Battle Fantasy 4 guy gets some soul crushing ones, whereas other people get ‘Too Hard’ or ‘Too Easy’ on the same game, or some mention of the game being broken.

Lars, do you think you could reccomend to the Steam guys to let developers add Refund FAQs to their refund page, for customers to see when refunding a game?

Something like:

Issue - Game Is Too Hard: You can turn the difficulty down in the options menu with no consequence, or you can increase experience and gold gain. Visiting the Steam Community Forums can also provide assistance!

Issue - Encountered A Bug: Please report the bug to the Steam Community Forums whether you desire a refund or not so it can be seen to. We will try to fix it in a timely fashion, or help you fix it if the bug is on your end.

Issue - Replayability: There is a NG+ mode at the end of the game which over doubles the content available, as well as challenge modes via achievements.

If a developer notices that many people are refunding for one specific reason, they can try to address it before the customer clicks ‘Refund’ and hopefully redirects them to the community forums to voice their issue there first.

#2

Hmm, interesting suggestion! I will definitely see if Steam will let us add little FAQ’s like these. That’s a really great idea if the customer can get their issue addressed right then and there.

We’ve been extremely lucky so far not to get any nasty notes like that.

#3

Is there some specific “refund message” section on Steam, or can you just find them among the reviews/forum posts, or something else?

#4

Devs share some of theirs on Twitter.

#5

One of the devs that made a visual novel had people writing that the game had too many words.
ummm…

#6

Looks like refund notices are accessible within the steam developer portal that us devs have access to. So far we’ve had very, very, few refunds. Top two reasons are “not what expected” and “bought by accident.” In the latter case notes from player seem to indicate “accident” means “didn’t know they’d already bought it in a humble bundle.” So far, so good.

#7

I’ve done that more than once. I’ve even bought a game I thought was neat, then realized I already had it in my Steam inventory for later. (D’oh!)

(I wouldn’t have tried to return anything, though, since it was my dumbness. (I say “wouldn’t have tried” since the Steam returns weren’t available when I’ve done that earlier. Now I check more thoroughly.))

It would be interesting to see what the global top reasons are (although I doubt anybody outside Valve could see them). I’ve seen some games that appeared to be extremely misleading in what they were (judging from the Steam voting comments).