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Comment by evo_9 | Hacker News Reader

One other semi-unrecognized advantage Valve has over consoles is their generous return policy. I’ve bought many games on a whim knowing if I don’t jive with it I can safely get a full refund. Contrast that with my Ps5 where my 2 year old managed to smash buttons while I was tied up on a work call and bought COD for $69 bucks… no way to refund it and I’m not a fan of shooters. Basically Fd on that one.

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I’ve made dozens of returns without a single issue on Steam.

I made one return on the PS5 in a similar situation, and it was a painful ordeal.

What about backward compatibility?

Try to run the original mario 64 on the switch without having to buy it again

My experience is otherwise. I returned one game and got banned from buying other games for a month - during a sale, so I missed that sale and was out of sync with friends for a bit.

I don't give a shit for the money, but fucking my social gaming time was unforgiveable. I still use Steam, but don't fucking trust Valves return policy.

Is there anything more to this? I’ve returned dozens of games that I didn’t end up liking and the only consequence I’ve faced is that games with trading cards don’t start dropping them until 2 hours of play time, which I think is completely fair.

There most certainly is. This is not Steam’s default refund procedure in the slightest. I’d be willing to bet they were abusing the system somehow and support caught them red handed.

I'm not sure how to abuse the return system. It's not like I pirate anything from Steam. And I used the return process through Steam - exactly once, as mentioned above. If I wasn't meant to do a thing, then I would think the process should not let me do it. But I returned it in good faith, for a game that managed to make me rage quit in less than an hour - I like to think at least that I am usually patient but I wasn't putting up with that shit.

If a Valve employee with rights to look into it is reading this - I'd love to know what I did so wrong. But given that human explanations from modern software based corporations are non-existent, I will assume I was treated as per their returns policy.

And the outcome has worked in Steams favour. I buy for (account) life now, for better or for worse. As previously mentioned, I don't care about the money so much as the social.

But my decision making process to drop the significant money required for Steam hardware will assume the return/warranty is worth precisely zero.

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