In a move that will make brick-and-mortar videogame retailers even less relevant, Valve announced Tuesday that it will be offering refunds on all videogame titles sold through its digital distribution service, Steam.
In order for a purchased title to qualify for this new refund policy, the title must have been purchased within the last 14 days and have less than two hours of playtime logged on the account on which the game was purchased.
“Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it,” the refund policy reads. “It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within fourteen days of purchase, and the title has been played for less than two hours.”
Furthermore, Valve will also “take a look” at refund requests that fall out of the 14-day/two-hour limitation.
The full refund policy goes into detail on how refunds will work for specific pieces of content sold through Steam, such as DLC, in-game purchases, pre-purchased games, Steam Wallet funds, and more.
Things to note from the policy:
- Refund requests can be made for DLC so long as the game for which the DLC was purchased has been played for less than two hours since purchasing said DLC.
- Where in-game purchases are concerned, developers will have to opt-in to allow refunds for each individual piece of purchasable in-game content. If developers do not opt-in for this service/feature, “in-game purchases in non-Valve games are not refundable through Steam.”
- Movies purchased through Steam are non-refundable.
- Gifts are non-refundable after being redeemed by the recipient.
- “If you have been banned by VAC (the Valve Anti-Cheat system) on a game, you lose the right to refund that game.”
- If Valve believes you are attempting to abuse the refund policy in order to play games for free, it reserves the right to stop offering refunds to you entirely. However, “We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price,” which should only help to alleviate a consumer’s fear over purchasing a videogame through Steam, knowing the game could be on sale later (i.e. within the 14-day refundable period).
- It will be interesting to see how the 14-day/two-hour time period limitation will affect videogames designed to be played in a short amount of time. Hopefully it does not deter developers from releasing short, but arguably worthwhile videogames on the popular distribution service.
In March, in compliance with new EU legislation, Valve updated the European subscriber agreement to effectively waive a consumer’s right to a “14-day withdrawal period,” instated by the aforementioned legislation. Valve has since updated that clause of the subscriber agreement with the following sentence: "Valve offers the Steam Refund Policy separate from the EU right of withdrawal described in the preceding sentence.”
