I disagree. There's no privilege in experiencing a game, or any other piece of art. Most art forms have traditionally had ways to experience them and then pay if you want them. You can listen to music on the radio or YouTube, go to galleries to see pictures and decide whether to buy them, read books at the library, ...

So it's quite normal to first enjoy art and then pay for it. People shouldn't pay for things they don't get any enjoyment from, and we accept that in many places. If you go to a restaurant and don't like the food you got, it's perfectly legitimate to ask it to be taken back. And that had a significant cost of production, unlike a digital game copy.

And really, I shouldn't need to read reviews and watch lets plays before I buy a game. The most straightforward way is to buy it, check it out, and get a refund if it doesn't grab me. That's also the way the art is. Do you really want your games to be viewed as a video or to be experienced?

Far as I know GOG only refunds if you have technical problems running the game, while Steam refunds you in any case.

Good games get bought, and kept. if your games are worth the money, I highly doubt the majority of people would do the refund. Also lets not forget that steam likes to ban, and restrict, accounts for using loop holes. It won't take long for people to know and understand just how bad it will be to use this system a lot.

Though on the flip side, I can't think of a single game in 25 years that lasted 2 hours and was worth money. That is less time than just about every free to play game offers.

I wonder though what Steam would do if you would invest a certain amount of money, buy a game, play it for 2 hours, ask for refund, then buy another game, play it for two hours, ask for refund, then .... So in the end you would have made no loss, especially if you bought only games that are short. And it would be all within the terms of Steam as far as I have understood them.

Some games I simply do not want to play anymore after two hours, and then why paying money for it if you can get them for free? A free two hour playtime is not bad.

Questioning someone after they assumed I have no business experience simply because I don't agree with their position is deserved and genuine. Besides, you are the last person that should be lecturing anyone on respect given the disengenuous and specious line of argument (I'm being generous with the term here) you've displayed in this thread.

1.) Purchasing as charity is a straw man of my claim.

2.) There are no free markets you are misusing and probably don't understand the term.

3.) On the idea of favors: your games not existing does me the consumer no harm, there are other games, if there are no games there are other entertainment products, as any economist will tell you a dollar not spent on your good or service will likely be a dollar spent somewhere else. So I am very much doing you a favor by buying your product and keeping you in business. It allows you to exist - period.

1.) I'm not failing to distinguish between large and small businesses - you are. I've simply pointed to the importance of regulating them. Small businesses can just as easily discriminate against their workers, not pay them or break any number of laws, the same as large multinational corporations, and just because a small business doesn't keep the sales tax on its items like Walmart or pay zero in tax like GE doesn't mean it wouldn't try if it grew to equal size. Thus the importance of laws and oversight which business obviously believes in as they pay mountains of money to lobbyists, ensuring the laws are written in their favor. This is why there are no free markets.

2.) Again you're creating a straw man. No one painted you as an evil corporate overlord. You're just pretending your paranoid fears are reality when they're clearly not and that kind of disengenuousness is not something I would want to support in terms of accidently buying one of your games.

1.) You're creating a false equivalency between consumers and business and an absurd one at that. Consumers are not purely driven by the profit motive, by law corporations are. If you've ever spent more for something than you needed to because you were empathetic to how it was produced or just didn't care about cost - you are clearly not thinking of getting the best price, you are not thinking like a business.

Business seems to understand how irrational consumers are that's why their ads almost never focus on cost., they're about all sorts of irrational things like status, lifestyle, heart tugging donations, etc. I suspect it might be harder for someone like you to comprehend this given your paranoid fantasies of a scheming public playing and returning your chintzy 2hr game.

2.) Piracy isn't prevalent in Android because users are too cheap to pay for an app - they're too poor to pay for them. Andoid is a low end market*, with 2/3's of the user base using junk phones. If these users couldn't pirate an app they'd most likely not buy it - this explains why they use junk phones in the first place - what they can't afford, (Apple/Samsung) they don't buy. But I get how your characterization of piracy feeds into your world view of an evil public trying to cheat you at any opportunity.
*http://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2013/11/15/android-dominates-market-share-but-apple-makes-all-the-money/

1.) Cutting two precedents I mentioned (that substantiate my claims) out of my quote, which you don't address - shows you don't argue in good faith. This is unsurprising given the straw men earlier.

2.) Yes you. You are propogating an irrational fear, the same as every sensationalistic news piece that invoked ideas of abuse when Steam announced its refund policy. There's no reason to believe your nonsensical views because there's nothing supporting them. If you'd like to create and believe in fictions - that's fine - just don't ask us to take it as reality.

Your fear mongering anecdotes aren't impressive as evidence for your baseless paranoia of refunds. You haven't addressed the issue of why someone wouldn't simply torrent your 2hr game instead of letting Steam hold their money and go through the hassle/risk of getting it back. Your understanding of piracy is equally incompetent. Ultimately piracy has more to do with the decisions of business than the boogieman knee-jerk image you keep painting the public with. For someone who thinks of themselves as a business person you certainly don't seem informed by the business press:

http://www.economist.com/node/3993427
http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy-really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/04/15/game-of-thrones-sets-piracy-world-record-but-does-hbo-care/
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/game-thrones-piracy-soars-season-787594

There's no loophole and no evidence or precident of abuse. Reactionary idiots deserve to be treated as such. There is as much substance to this issue of refunds as the idea of voter fraud.

You can paint yourself as a human interest story or disguise personal anecdotes as the state of an industry. You can create grand, labored, and false analogies about unlocked doors. Ultimately you can present as many specious, and fictitious statements as you'd like. The question of refunds is about rights - those of the consumer vs those of business.

Why should the consumer be asked to take a risk with their money (or their health for that matter) on a product or service without any protection? Why should the public be at risk for the errors, oversights or simply malicious behavior of business? This is such banal, intuitive, obvious questioning but in the business run society we have, it is unsurprising to be inundated with gullible people that simply recite the business as saint and victim paradigm when it comes to policy debate. How much money have consumers lost to buggy, broken, or incompatible software in the last 10 years on Steam that couldn’t be refunded?

Steam isn't instituting a refund policy because of some good will it carries. They haven't had a refund policy for the better part of 10years because they weren't forced to, they have a monopoly. Now that their status to do business in England and the EU is under threat of law they are busily self-regulating before they get a harsher decree by the courts. And that is really what people should understand - businesses are perfectly willing to externalize the cost of a faulty product or service to the public until they're dragged into court and forced not to.

p.s. If you spend as much time on your games as you do spamming nearly every post on this (now) 15+ page thread, then I'm sure you have nothing to worry about.

But this is more like an exception than like a rule. If you buy a burger at a fast food chain and it tastes not really good, you cannot give it back. If you buy a book and after the first 10 pages you don't like it you cannot give it back. And most other things you cannot really request a refund. It is probably at the discretion of the vendor to offer this service or not offering it.

I guess one can do it like Steam and they clearly speculate that this gives them the edge while not costing too much, but there is no real need for it. You could also just read reviews, ask a friend, ... And also for small games the two hour time period is quite much in proportion to the whole game length. So why not letting the publishers decide on an individual basis how much free playing they want to give for each of their games? Steam has all the technology ready to implement this. They could even display a short warning 10 minutes before the free playing time expires.

GOG also allows 30-days refunds, as long you haven't downloaded any of the game's files or extras.

It's not so much the exception as the reasons why the customer is complaining about the food. There may be genuine concerns that would annoy any customer. For example, one problem that a lot of restaurants here in Germany have is that a lot of them claim that they use fresh mushrooms before you're served a dish with mushrooms that are quite obviously from a jar or a tin.

Or if the salad in your burger is quite obviously past its sell-by date (not a rare occurrence), or if you order a steak medium-rare and it turns out well-done.

Applying these analogies to games, there are a lot of games where developers make misleading or (sometimes deliberately) ambiguous claims. In fact, this problem is so widespread that a refund mechanism had to be introduced to bring it under control and introduce more accountability. Not all are "defective" in the objective and legal sense of the word, but suffer from overblown and unwarranted promises of quality.

As far as Jefequeso's games are concerned, I've played The Moon Sliver (not played The Music Machine yet - he was kind enough to issue free Steam codes for it, but I've not got around to playing it yet), and while I don't think he's mis-sold the game in any way, it's not hard to see the misgivings that many people have with it. For example, he does mention that it's "short"; but it's quite understandable that people didn't understand just how short (I got through it in around 45 minutes).

Also, when you create such a short game, the onus is on the developer to make sure that short hour blows your mind. In such a short time, every technical flaw, every narrative misstep and every structural problem is amplified several times over. That sub-hour experience needs to be perfect, just like a short film. In a film, when you have 10 minutes to tell a story, every shot, every cut, every colour counts.

There needs to be a strong artistic reason for such games to exist, but many of them are just absurdly pretentious and appallingly bad, such as Dinner Date, The Path and Pregnancy. I wouldn't necessarily put The Moon Silver in that same category, but ultimately, the target audience for such games is more one that leans towards patronage rather than traditional paid licensing for such experiences. If it doesn't offer a mindblowing experience, then you'll have one very pissed customer.

And I would say that antagonising a segment of your customer base that is on the fence about buying your game is not a good idea when you're competing with more lengthy experiences not much above that price bracket (by comparison, at this time on Steam, Jefequeso's competing with Super Meat Boy, Fez, Space Empires IV Deluxe, Crazy Machines, Waking Mars, and Abe's Oddysee - games that are more technically accomplished and offer longer experiences). Short art games are a niche market - if people buy them, then you can be sure that it will seldom be out of a genuine sense of value. Sales are motivated either by a desire to donate, or by misunderstanding.

Let's take a moment to look at the SteamCharts rankings.

17,135 people are playing The Witcher 3 right now. The peak player count is 92,268.

Terraria's numbers on the main chart are newer than its record. The all time peak for that game is just over 97,000.

I see numbers in the low tens of thousands for Don't Starve, Mount & Blade, Kerbal Space Program, The Witcher 1 and 2, Banished, Divinity: Original Sin, and Pillars of Eternity.

Now think hard. What do these games all have in common?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but all of them have mainstream appeal and all of them are on GOG. What's the point?

Add as extra content as possible. Make it so that walkthrough makers will be working on your game for DECADES.

Speaking of Steamcharts, it seems that The Moon Sliver has hardly been touched these past months before suddenly peaking on Tuesday - when refunds were introduced.

Which begs the question - would that peak have come about without refunds?

Because they are on GOG and have no copy protection, these games hundreds of thousands of people buy and play on Steam can be pirated without the slightest inconvenience or risk. And yet here we are, buying them; and there we are also on Steam, buying these games in their millions despite many of the Steam versions having DRM.

When was the last time anybody got in trouble for illegally downloading these games? My guess is never. And yet OP is upset - before any evidence of it materializes - that we are so vicious we won't be satisfied merely to pirate his far less expensive games; no, first we'll give him the impression that we mean to pay him, and then yank our money back out of his hands just in time for him to miss a house payment. Ha ha!

And for this thrill we will happily add to a flag on our Steam accounts, which sooner or later turns red and harms the account.

Is there anyone here who didn't read the stories about Amazon flagging accounts for abusing the Kindle refund policy? Maybe, but I bet there's no one on Steam who missed that story. After ten years of permanent forum bans, permanent VAC bans, account lockdowns at the first sign of a bank dispute; and nothing less than the nuclear option if, God help you, you try a chargeback... well, maybe not all of us, but a safe bet is a good 50 or 60 million of us have learned not to dick around with Steam's hair-trigger temper. Especially not to save nine dollars.

30-days is better than 14 days, but being able to check the game and the refund it is >>>>>>> only being able to get a refund if you haven't played or are experiencing technical difficulties. Steam has just opened the market to actually making sure you only pay for games you enjoy, which is huge.

I'm not saying which one is better, but merely objecting to your line "Far as I know GOG only refunds if you have technical problems running the game, while Steam refunds you in any case."

GOG's refunds are not only for technical difficulties, unless you meant to say only in the sense of refunding after you have played the game.

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry for not being clear.