Having a retail person give game recommendations has kind of been obsoleted by youtube and the wider internet. "top 10" lists do a good job of showing you what the hottest stuff in each category is.
$60 is an expensive AAA game by Steam standards and almost certainly comes with entirely too much content to appease people who think they need a lot of content to justify paying $60.
$60 is also what your average NES game retailed for, which would in today's money be over $200. And most of them were complete garbage.
Most games today that aren't AAA titles, which is to say the actually interesting games, go for a lot less than $60 anyway. A $20 game is the cost of one decent meal out.
Without refunds I would simply not purchase one unless I was sure it was good value, but with refunds I will buy something based on a few pictures on the store and see if I like it.
Of course, if what they advertise is misleading then that's a different story.
What logical difference is there between studying the reviews and screenshots over playing the game for 30 minutes and working out yourself if you like it?
Actually I don't think that's necessarily true. We tend to be more judgmental of things we get for free than things we had some investment in. By having a "demo-style" return policy you're possibly being more critical of the game than you would be if you had no opportunity to get your money back. Not to mention the scheme's effect on shorter works. You could play all of a one hour game and then decide after the fact it wasn't worth the money. At least one developer has quit game development because of this, which means that there is a pressure to ensure that every game on Steam lasts at least two hours, and that'll probably take the form of having the best stuff locked away until after the two hour mark.
> What logical difference is there between studying the reviews and screenshots over playing the game for 30 minutes and working out yourself if you like it?
I'll admit, I can't meaningfully articulate the difference it makes when you pay for a game and then take your money back vs not paying for it.
But consider this: how would a 30 minute demo of a game be different than the first 30 minutes of the full game? Like screenshots and reviews it would be designed to give you an overview of the complete game experience it is trying to sell you, whereas the first 30 minutes are what is necessary to get the game going.
This is what the market of gamers are demanding and I do not see that changing or that it is an issue. These days it is common for people to spend huge amounts of time on a single game. It is completely normal for someone to say "I have spent 1000 hours on Minecraft/CSGO/Skyrim over the last 10 years" so companies have to adapt to building games that last a decade and can generate recurring sales through things like graphical updates and extra content.
New PS2 games cost around $50 USD back in the 2000s and most new PS4 games actually cost less now when you account for inflation.
Where does it say that?
The best quote I could find from them:
>Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.
I have refunded about 40 purchases on steam and never had them denied if you fit in the 2 hours / 2 weeks rule.
Literally the first paragraph on the refunds page.
> You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.