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Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to see if publishers will be willing to opt into this. On one hand, letting someone sit through the install time and see if they enjoy the game before paying for it probably significantly reduces the hurdle of "hmm, do I really want this game" for many consumers. On the other hand, if your PC port is a shameless, unoptimized moneygrab then players realizing that fact might balk rather than committing to actually buying the game.

It could also end up encouraging longer "tutorial" sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.

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Valve will refund any Steam purchase if made within 2 weeks and with less than 2 hours play time (see https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/).

Therefore this doesn't really change much when it comes to realization that the game sucks very early on.

I suppose there is some small risk difference between "play 90 minutes for free, then decide to pay" vs "play 120 minutes for full game price, then get it back". But in my experience and from what I've heard over the years the refund policy is reliably honored.

Honestly, I've always been too wary of playing 2.0001 hours and losing access. I like this system much better.

You dont lose access. Just repeat the process to get a human review.

I have about 150 games in the backlog that I buy in sales to play later, when I don't like them after 30 minutes I just refund them. Steam has been pretty good with this, doesn't matter if I bought it months before, they will still refund them.

I guess the demos would be better for Steam as they don't lose credit card fees.

I think refunds don’t cost the company. Chargebacks do.

Refunds don't generally get the fees returned, so I buy a game for $10, $0.30 in fees goes to Paypal, Steam gets $9.70. I return the game, Steam gives me $10, but PayPal only gives them $9.70, so they're out $0.30. Across a million returns that adds up.

Anecdotally, I've had this experience lately:

"We will not be granting a refund at this time. The date of the purchase exceeds 2 weeks (our refund policy maximum)."

Interesting.

How much was the game in this anecdote?

> Valve will refund any Steam purchase if made within 2 weeks and with less than 2 hours play time

Yea, I tried to take advantage of this when I picked up Stellaris, but that's not a game (I don't think) that you can evaluate in 2 hours. I gave it a couple of stabs, but found it just way more complex than I was interested it. I obviously played it more than 2 hours, and they wouldn't refund my money. No harm, no foul, but for some games, 2 hours isn't enough.

We must be very different people... If a game or movie doesn't grab my attention within the first 15 minutes, it goes in the round file. Life is too short for mediocre entertainment!

Being complex and taking time to get into is quite different than being mediocre. Some games take hours to just grasp the rules and its first by the fourth or fifth time you're playing that they become amazing. It's like dunking on racing because a guy without license can't figure out how to change gear.

I don't have much use for mediocrity either, which is why I will always choose a flawed masterpiece over something merely competent. None of my favorite books have grabbed my attention in the first fifteen pages. Several of my favorite games took over 40 hours to become even tolerable. They made up for it by being uncommonly beautiful by the end.

A slow start is a flaw, but in my eyes a forgivable one.

>2 hours isn't enough

MS Flight Sim comes to mind. Apparently game content is downloaded in-game, and it's in the region of 120GB, so many folk blow through 2 hours before they even get to play the game.

i had a few games that racked up hours before i even got to play anything, so i agree, this is an issue. somehow play time should not start counting until you actually get to enter the game (after character creation and any other setup that needs to be done)

The two hour rule isn't solid. I've returned a game after completing a 1 hour tutorial of the game, only to get into the main game and find out it was nothing like the tutorial lead me to believe the game was. I had to AFK during the middle of playing, so I ended up with 5 hours of gameplay. I just told them what happened, said why I wanted to refund it, and I still got it refunded. It took five hours of the game running for me to determine that I just didn't like nor enjoy it.

but they're not reliable about this either. i had a similar experience once with an RTS and i asked for a refund at the 4-5 hour mark and was told no dice.

The only angle I see is now you don't need to distribute the game data with your pirated software. let the user download the trial and apply a patch to that.

As a software pirate, I hate this idea, or anything like it.

I can see this being useful to fill up a steam cache though, depending on how it works.

I've long believed that a market culture of releasing limited game demos increases the quality of games. If someone has the opportunity to play some section of the game they'll be able to judge the game on something other than marketing copy and curated screenshots.

> It could also end up encouraging longer "tutorial" sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.

This made me wonder about "optimizing the tutorial" for content of the game such that it actually takes the same amount of or less time to play through the rest of the game after. I wouldn't be surprised if this is attempted in some cases and it would be pretty disheartening to see it widespread.

Steam already offers no questions asked refunds if a game is played for under 2 hours (and based on my experience will give refunds outside of that policy if the game won't run).

From what other comments have said they also seem to give refunds outside of that if you have a good explanation (“questions asked” I guess)

My kid can spend longer than that in the character designer.

That would be a "character" flaw...

Publishers who use denuvo won't, because that implies giving random accounts either a non-protected copy of the exe, or generating a lot of denuvo keys that get revoked after a very short time (which doesn't break it but significantly weakens it)

The first game to offer a trial is Dead Space which uses Denuvo. Game is also published by EA which would be at the tail of my list of consumer friendly publishers.

Yeah, my first thought was "interesting approach in the age of 100 GB games" ...

And I had the same thought last weekend, when Diablo 4 had their Server Slam for 2 days (70 GB download).

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