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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

I bought two indie games recently based on word of mouth alone: Undertale and The Beginner's Guide. Both are $10 on Steam (and coincidentally, both are made mostly by solo-developers).

Undertale (http://store.steampowered.com/app/391540/) is one of the best games I've played in years. I wish I could have paid more for it. If you're reading this, buy Undertale now.

The Beginner's Guide (http://store.steampowered.com/app/303210/) is...very indie, to put it mildly. And almost made me feel like I wasted my money.

There's a lot of risk with buying games freely, which is one of the reasons why gamers are unwilling to buy at high prices. However, Steam Refunds may help with this and may make gamers more willing to buy at higher prices.

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It's rare that I purchase games on a whim, but based off your comment, I went ahead and ponied up the ten bucks for Undertale. Looks interesting!

On that same note: I'm not a fan - generally speaking - of survival games or early access, but I purchased The Flame in the Flood, and it's already given me back the entertainment for the cost, and can only get better.

I think the author of the article gets it right on pricing per hour of gameplay for indie games, in a general sense. I'm not sure this works for AAA games, though, where RPGs have - and are expected to have - tens of hours of gameplay if one simply burns through it, and multiplayer games have an almost unknown fun-per-price-hour factor (Rocket League comes to mind), due to the seemingly variable nature of how much time people invest in multiplayer games.

If that makes no sense, I apologize - alcohol and dumbly meatsticks.

The Beginner's Guide is... Uncomfortable. It's an unusual game that kinda needs to be experienced and, well, sat through. But yeah, I felt it was just barely passing muster for ten bucks. It felt incomplete or missing some critical piece of context, and so it seemed to fall short of whatever it was trying to be (unless that's what it wants us to think... But that way Dragons lie).

After playing it, I stumbled across a YouTube comment on Christopher Odd's play-through that linked to a talk the author gave to some college students a year or so ago. It fits so well, I'm calling out spoiler warning. But it's a fine chaser that - at least for me - cleansed the palette and let the game settle. Warning: it's pretty uncomfortable too, but I think it's a damn sight less gnostic.

[0] http://livestream.com/accounts/6845410/gamesnow/videos/83818...

> However, Steam Refunds may help with this and may make gamers more willing to buy at higher prices.

Don't trust that you can get a refund on steam. Their policy is you get one refund, and that's it. I have a steam account with hundreds of titles, bought over many years. The amount of money I've spent with them is in the low thousands of dollars. I've once requested a refund, because I disagreed with particularly onerous terms in the ToS for a game (shown after the purchase, during the install). They refunded me, but made it very clear that this was a one-time thing and I would never again be able to have a product refunded, as per their policy.

It kinda put me off them TBH. I mean, of course you have to protect against people gaming the system, but this was clearly not the case here.

Your experience may be different if you're a famous name on reddit/twitch/whatever.

They completely overhauled their refund policy recently. Now you can get a no-questions-asked refund for any game you've played for less than two hours.

http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

Interesting, thanks, that's good to know. The game in question had about 8 minutes "played", so this would cover that.

Good on them for improving their service.

I take it you haven't been reading much gaming news in the past few months. Steam now has refunds, like, for real. It used to just be a one time thing and they were real hard asses about it, but now they're very willing to give refunds.

I was listening the 'matched' podcast where they were talking about The Beginner's Guide. It's meant to play as a an emotional ride to help people understand what the life of an artist can be. Definitely not for everyone, but it is supposed to be on the level of "this 'game', made me feel something about myself... Maybe even empathy for the maker too". Can definitely see how it feels like a waste, but maybe give it another play through and kinda ponder on things. It might make the purchase feel less wasteful :D

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