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Comment by MikusR | Hacker News Reader

> treat your customers well

That's why it took a lawsuit to get refund support for Steam.

That lawsuit specifically had to do with meeting Australian guidelines. I personally have had zero complaints with the Steam refund system here in America.

The Steam refund system in America only exists because of the Australian lawsuit

They didn’t have a refund system initially.

Valve’s customers are the studios.

Only half-sarcastically.

Not really. More like hostage to distribution. If you list your game on Steam, you can't list your game for a cheaper price anywhere else on the internet.

People put up with that because they still come out ahead by listing on Steam.

Is this true for everything? There are open-source games (a great example is Mindustry) that are available for free elsewhere while costing to buy via Steam.

No, it's only true if you're selling steam keys for cheaper on other sites. Devs can generate steam keys for free and have other sites sell them, but they're not allowed to list them for cheaper than what's on steam. Steam makes $0 off these steam keys and it still costs them money (bandwidth and such) so it's a more than fair deal asking to not list them for cheaper.

If you're using a completely different distribution system/client like itch.io or the epic store, you're allowed to list them for cheaper.

It isn’t restricted to Steam keys. It’s anytime you sell the same game for a net cheaper price elsewhere on the internet.

This is the dominant reason that the Epic store isn’t taking off, because Steam is enforcing network effects. Devs can’t switch and so customers won’t switch.

In fairness Steam's prices are very reasonable. I imagine there are ways around it anyway.

Because of the policy, games with under short but high quality gameplay are getting hit with refunds. If the playtime is under 2 hours, the refund request goes through with very minimal abuse protection. I've seen people try to do speedrun where the goal is to finish the game in under 2 hours and get a refund. Publishing a short but high production value game on Steam has become a lot less profitable.

Not to mention that the refund policy can be useless as the playtime includes load screens when the server is busy, which happens regardless of the studio size.

That being said, I do believe that the refund policy improved sales volume overall because people buy games knowing that they can always refund if the game isn't for them. Return of the demos I guess?

People rushing to finish your game in under 2 hours to claim a refund are not your market. If they make up a large enough percentage of purchases for it to matter, you are going bankrupt anyway. They are not playing at beating your game. They are playing at beating the system. Like all those pirates who collect huge libraries of software, movies or music that they are never going to use or care about so little they would never pay anything at all for it.

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