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Comment by htag | Hacker News Reader

I'm very interested in how this interacts with Valve's standard policy of giving refunds for games you've played for less than two hours.

I suspect there will be more demo downloads, but fewer total (non-refunded) purchases with this modal. The question is where do you apply friction, before download or after 90 minutes of gameplay.

I'm also generally concerned with demo-hacking. Putting all the novelty in the first 90 minutes. Placing one large cliff hanger or achievement near the 90 minute mark. Building a starting place that takes just over 90 minutes to get out of. I do get the impression PC devs are aware of the 120 minute mark and try to make the first two hours strong. This lowers that bar.

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The one difference is that Valve can choose to treat repeated refund requests from a user as abuse, and stop processing them. With a demo the intentions are clear, and there is no payment transaction at all.

This already happens. Most people do not complete games[0]. You can verify by checking out the achievements for various games. This already leads to games having fun beginnings but lacklustre end games

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0: https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/17/gdc-most-players-don...

The way "achievements" have dropped in quality by any measure in the last decades should be scrutinized almost as much as lack of retained player interest.

Many people barely start games, let alone finish them. Look at achievement stats for things that happen very early on in games. You'll find achievements that happen 1-2 hours in with only 60% earn rates. I don't think it's meaningful to look at completion rate without first normalizing with the "starting" rate.

One quick example from my steam library: Terraria

- Chop down your first tree. (You can do this immediately after you start playing): 86.5%

- Craft your first work bench. (Can be done immediately after cutting a tree): 56.8%

- Survive your character's first full night (24 minutes of playtime): 78.8%

And only 25% have gotten `Champion of Terraria` which means about 2/3rds of players did not reach the "end" of the game. That is inline with the linked article which states:

> “Statistically, most players don’t finish games. We’ve all seen numbers that say something like a third [do finish games], on average," Rouse III said later in the presentation.

Note: I do not play terraria and am assuming moon lord is the end game boss from here: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Moon_Lord

It's not that simple, though, either. I've played a lot of Terraria. I've never seen the moon lord. That's because it was added a long time after I played. I did beat everything that existed, but they changed the game afterward.

Obviously this isn't the case for every game but that skews the numbers too.

True. After writing my comment, I realized Terraria is not the best example for a few reasons, but it's good enough to serve my original intention. I wasn't trying to contest that a large portion of people don't finish games, just that the numbers can be deceiving if you only look at completion rates. It matters whether someone drops a game 10 minutes in vs an hour in vs 10 hours in. Not just if they completed the game.

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