Battlefield 2042 has continued to lose players and anger long-time franchise fans since its November release. With rage reaching a record high, Steam is gearing up to break its own policies to appease the angry mob with a full refund for the EA Dice title. Typically, players can apply for a refund if a game was purchased within the last 14 days and has less than two hours of gameplay time logged. Some players have taken to social media to share their experiences with Valve’s storefront, claiming that the rules are being bent for PC users.
In the above Reddit post, user Roboserg highglights messages sent to Steam customer service. Although his first request was denied due to having over two hours of playtime, Roboserg noted that at least two hours was spent attempting to troubleshoot a bug that consistantly reset his configuration file. “The broken state of the game and its bugs did not allow me to test the game properly, which is the reason I wish to refund the game,” he wrote in his message. Steam relented, and the player managed to snag a full refund. Sadly, those playing the title on PlayStation seem to be out of luck.
For Steam to so blatently break its own rules highlights the overwhelming failure of Battlefield 2042. “The fact that STEAM ITSELF had to bend its policy from how poor this game did, shows just how badly they did,” one user wrote. In a brutal review, Steam user MattyCamps took aim at the dev team. “You don’t care anymore and have milked enough out of what was originally a classic game that we would all spend 100s of hours on.”
Battlefield 2042 was released on November 19, 2021, on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. The title has not been well-received, with a huge influx of negative user reviews uploaded on release day, too many balance issues to count, and missing gameplay features. 2042 has seen decreasing sales since the week after launch, peaking at 100,590 concurrent users in November 2021 and barely surpassing 10,000 on January 10, 2022.