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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

Recently an expansion for Elite Dangerous came out, names "Odyssey". It's been a very buggy and unfinished experience, and there's very little actual content added in it for the $60 price tag.

Steam has a policy of 2 hours of playtime = no return. By playing the tutorial I already had an hour down. Then another hour trying to fix performance issues (to no avail). I tried to issue a return and nope. So now I have a product that falsely advertised itself and I can't return.

Gamers need the FTC to rise up.

Steam response: "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."

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I think you might want to do a bit more research on Steam's return policy. It's incredibly liberal.

I've played games for 10 hours and returned them with no problem. I don't think you're _wrong_ but I don't think you're right either. I worded my responses well, I told them what was good and bad, and my very reason why.

I've enjoyed their support system for returns and have very little to complain about with it.

"We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."

Their policy in more detail: "Requests are considered on a case by case basis and are not typically issued for purchases of released products that are more than 14 days old, or if the purchased product has more than 2 hours of playtime. For in-game items the refund period is 48 hours and the item must not have been consumed, modified, or transferred. "

2 weeks or under 2 hours of usage is not "incredibly liberal", except perhaps by US standards.

Surely you're not suggesting games should have the same return periods as physical products? If the limit was 30 days then refund scams would be rampant.

Why do games get an exemption?

If I buy a power tool, use it for a project, then return it, surely that's as open to abuse?

Games retailers should utilise the same tools as others - don't sell to people you think are abusing your return system.

Most hardware stores in the USA require tools to be unopened/unused to be returned.

Most retailers are pretty restrictive and those that aren't, such as REI, have generally been notable for those policies.

In my mind, software return policies should be more liberal than physical goods since there isn't any potential loss to the retailer due to damage.

Even REI has had to change policy in recent years due to what some may call "abusing the policy", e.g. https://www.rei.com/conversations/ask-an-rei-employee/return...

I had to request a refund in the Epic Games Store, and it had already counted hours without me even having played the actual game, just trying and failing to log into the servers.

They refunded without a question though, so I felt well cared for by EGS.

I've only returned 3 games. All were over 2h played. Are you sure they can't help?

It's basically a steam customer support lottery if it's been over 2 hours. Sometimes you get someone who actually reads the reason for refunding, but most of the time they just automatically deny it, even if the developer said they'll honor all refund requests.

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