Steam's two-hour refund policy leads to indie developer quitting game development - $8.99 for 90 minute games

[Slimy Time]

Make it's price reflect it's length, no-one is going to return a $2-$5 game plus seeing one with overwhelmingly positive reviews would make people buy it.

You can get old, full on, at the time $50-60 games on sale for maybe double what he was asking for.

Earlier this month they had a steam sale for the Lego Superhero games for about 10 to 11 bucks where I am. So out of nostalgia for the old Lego Star Wars games, I got one. Full on voice acted, open world kinda fun game. It's 11 bucks for tens to potentially hundreds of hours of fun, all DLC included. Sure, it's a 5+ year old lego game, but whatever.

This motherfucker wanted close to that at 9 bucks for 90 mins of walking and getting jumpscared, and then gets mad when people use a loophole to return it. Should have done better.

 

[Dynamite Bean]

Dev addressed some arguing going on the forums

Locked the thread of course

Stop arguing! :: Summer of '58 General Discussions

I did not ask people to help me with money, I did not encourage people to make any donations! I just described my problem! I wrote that I was going on a long vacation. The fact that you are building your guesses about my advertising here, you are wrong! Can you express your opinions? And I can...

steamcommunity.com

Archive(sorry if anything is wrong, newfag to this stuff)

Stop arguing! :: Summer of '58 General Discussions

archived 27 Aug 2021 19:38:50 UTC

archive.md

 

[cummytummies]

When an article starts with

This is why we can't have nice things.

I know I'm in for some Reddit-tier games "journalism".

You can get old, full on, at the time $50-60 games on sale for maybe double what he was asking for.

You can get old, full on $60 games for $1 on Steam provided they're old enough.

 

[Cuntflaps]

You can get old, full on, at the time $50-60 games on sale for maybe double what he was asking for.

Earlier this month they had a steam sale for the Lego Superhero games for about 10 to 11 bucks where I am. So out of nostalgia for the old Lego Star Wars games, I got one. Full on voice acted, open world kinda fun game. It's 11 bucks for tens to potentially hundreds of hours of fun, all DLC included. Sure, it's a 5+ year old lego game, but whatever.

This motherfucker wanted close to that at 9 bucks for 90 mins of walking and getting jumpscared, and then gets mad when people use a loophole to return it. Should have done better.

Yea, if your goal is to buy something for 10 USD from Steam and get serious value, there is no shortage of stuff to buy. During sales, you can get some of the best-selling titles out there for that price a year or two after release. Hell, there are often $10 bundles with multiple older games, each of which would individually be a better value for $10 than this dev's walking simulator.

 

[NoonmanR]

Afaik valve is forced to keep the refund policy bc of EU law so thankfully it's not in danger of disapearing. So lmao get fucked walking sim dev.

 

[FoolhardStar]

If you're gonna make a game that short and with relatively little replay value or anything else to really think on and enjoy, put it up for five bucks at most or, better yet, put it out for free. Mediocre to actually good games that come out for a dime or less tend to get a lot less flack than something you have to pay money for, because wasting money on something that's overpriced or not even worth money doesn't make people very happy versus "well that sucked" when they only gave a shit game time.

If games like Yume Nikki or FAITH cost money, they probably wouldn't have been received as warmly as they have. But they are free, and people that enjoyed those games paid for the developers' other projects when they decided to release them with a price tag attached Yume Nikki's sequel/remake was shit though. Popular freeware not-RPG RPGmaker games like Witch's House or Misao have been getting rereleases on Steam the past few years with some upgrades, and people supported the devs by buying them because they enjoyed the preexisting free game. Even LISA, one of the best RPGmaker games I think I've ever played, is below 20bux.

 

[cummytummies]

I think it's totally okay for a developer to make a game that's short and charge even like $20 for it, that's how much Edith Finch costs and it's only like 2 hours.

The point is though that if a game is gonna be that short, it really has to be memorable and special. You have to provide a piece of art that is worth $20 of value. Big game studios provide value by making mediocre games that you can play for a really long time. Talented indie studios do this by making short to average legnthed games that are really special. Hollow Knight is fifteen dollars. If your 90 minute game isn't artistically offering half the value of Hollow Knight, yet you're charging half the price, you're charging too much.

Ding ding ding. This here is the correct answer.

Everybody in this thread unironically promoting padding, or complaining about this one specific game being short when games that are too long are dime a dozen, or crying that games "shouldn't try to be art" or worst of all saying that "dollars should equate to X amount of hours" can fuck right off. You can make anything as long as you make it well. Well-made games don't suffer from refunds. Case closed.

 

[winterfag]

I have refunded games on steam before, and even though it's automated it's still slow enough that I wouldn't bother trying to "game" the system for short games. I wouldn't want to sit down and play a game while thinking of a two hour timer the whole time. Even for a small little indie game it'd be way too distracting to think about this while playing. If you're the type of person to buy it just to refund it later then you're probably the type who'll just pirate it anyway

 

[Yaniv’s Hairy Balls]

Then quit making shitty 8bit walking simulators and make a fucking game.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Then quit making shitty 8bit walking simulators and make a fucking game.

These people only have two settings, walking simulators or visual novel. Anything else scares the shit out of them from a technical standpoint.

 

[X Pac Heat]

Dev addressed some arguing going on the forums

Locked the thread of course

Stop arguing! :: Summer of '58 General Discussions

I did not ask people to help me with money, I did not encourage people to make any donations! I just described my problem! I wrote that I was going on a long vacation. The fact that you are building your guesses about my advertising here, you are wrong! Can you express your opinions? And I can...

steamcommunity.com

Archive(sorry if anything is wrong, newfag to this stuff)

Stop arguing! :: Summer of '58 General Discussions

archived 27 Aug 2021 19:38:50 UTC

archive.md

What's the difference between passing by and getting the refund? Either way you don't get the money.

 

[Dynamite Bean]

What's the difference between passing by and getting the refund? Either way you don't get the money.

I don't think there's a difference, it's just the dev being an angry retard and can't accept that people refund his shitty game and have seen everything there is to it
Any other dev would take this as a reason to improve and try harder in the future

like Scott and fnaf for example, I think those games are milked beyond belief but Scott at least took criticism to heart and improved.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Literally the first time I've ever heard of something like this happening

Look up Sunset. The TLDR version, a company that was living off government art grants had to turn a profit once the grant money stopped. Put out a first person walking simulator about a black woman. It bombed. The devs rage quit the industry, screaming that they hated gamers on twitter. One even set up a crowd funding campaign to get the gamers/the industry to pay him or else he would write angry blog posts bad mouthing gaming. Nothing of value was lost.

We did get this.

Man ignores policy, gets mad when consumers don't like their shitty game. More at 11. Anyway, pretty sure that since this is his third walking simulator, he figured it'll bring easy money, especially when more popular YouTubers need to play through garbage just to keep their 1 upload a day schedule. Simple game mechanics beats story, writing, gameplay - anything else, right???

About that...

Turns out the "get popular YouTuber/streamer to play your game = $$$" is long dead. When it does work, it's usually games that are fun and replayable. People are smart enough to spot a bad game, and if someone feels they got what they wanted from just watching, it doesn't sell.

The youtube jumpscare genre is not really a thing any more. PewDiePie hasn't done that for years now. The only one who still does that is Markiplier, and even then it is mostly free games or "demos" of games that are never finished.

In a way, it's admirable how out of touch the devs are, assuming the world as it was in 2014 when FNAF and PT were all over the internet, and before Everybody's Gone to the Rapture killed the walking simulator genre. Maybe then these games might have had an audience, but they're 7 years too late.

These people only have two settings, walking simulators or visual novel. Anything else scares the shit out of them from a technical standpoint.

And pixel art puzzle platformers.

 

[Solid Snek]

Ding ding ding. This here is the correct answer.

Everybody in this thread unironically promoting padding, or complaining about this one specific game being short when games that are too long are dime a dozen, or crying that games "shouldn't try to be art" or worst of all saying that "dollars should equate to X amount of hours" can fuck right off. You can make anything as long as you make it well. Well-made games don't suffer from refunds. Case closed.

Technically, yes. Anyone, can make any game, and charge any price they like, so long as the market is willing to bear it.

That said, game length, not-being-art, and (fun) padding, are all perfectly sensible, perfectly valid metrics by which to measure a game's monetary value. If you are willing to pay $20 for a game that's got less than two hours of replay value, then I'm sorry - the devs may not have made a mistake, but you the consumer have.

 

[Toolbox]

This situation is funny but it makes me yearn for another digital homicide. All of these current indie proto-lolcows are the same, they make a shitty game or two, people reject it, and they cry on the internet. Very rarely do we get a spergfest of such massive proportions that it involves multiple lawsuits including against random steam users and Youtubers, from a 'studio' that essentially just pumps out the same game with flipped assets indefinitely onto the storefront. This guy's games aren't much of a step up from that content but the story is missing several crucial steps.

 

[Irrelevant]

I actually like walking simulators and overpriced art games but 90% of these guys can't take any criticism.

Most of the time they just need better puzzles and it'd easily add an hour or two to the game.

Then if I say "I liked this game but the puzzles were too easy so maybe it's not worth $10" they'll come at me saying "you just don't understand art". Fuck you, I understood the art and I enjoyed it I just want better puzzles because I'm not a retard.

 

[cummytummies]

That said, game length, not-being-art, and (fun) padding, are all perfectly sensible, perfectly valid metrics by which to measure a game's monetary value. If you are willing to pay $20 for a game that's got less than two hours of replay value, then I'm sorry - the devs may not have made a mistake, but you the consumer have.

$8.99 is the price of a pint of beer or half a movie ticket. It's less than the price of admission to a museum or a gallery. Significantly less than it costs reserve a sporting venue or go paintballing or go-karting or bowling or golfing or to an amusement park or get concert tickets or whatever else people do for fun.

If someone can provide me a thoroughly fun 90 minutes for $8.99 that's a good deal. In fact if you took those 90 minutes worth of good ideas and padded them out to 4 hours I would consider that a much worse deal. If spending $10 on a fun evening by yourself seems too expensive then the issue is you being poor, not others being bad with their money.

The problem with this game isn't that it's $8.99, it's that it's a bad game.

 

[Ed Special]

The problem with this game isn't that it's $8.99, it's that it's a bad game.

It's both. You can make a bad game, or you can charge $8.99, but doing both? You're gonna get fucked.
Just look at Bad Rats. Shit's sold lots of copies as a the quintessential "Bad Game on Steam" and nobody ever bothers refunding it because... yeah, it's usually like $0.49 on Steam, or, on the rare occasion that it isn't on sale... $0.99.

 

[Product Placement]

I feel bad for the dev, not like people weren't buying the game in the first place, but buying it, beating and refunding it. Also seems so people gave the game a good review before refunding.

I do agree 90 minutes for $9 isn't a great deal, but rather a game but short and to the point rather than a bloated mess of AAA games like Ass Creed.

But at the end of the day, how the hell do you fix it. If you make it a 1 hour cut off and remove it all together, just making stuff worse for customers to only help a few small indie devs.

 

[Irrelevant]

$8.99 is the price of a pint of beer or half a movie ticket. It's less than the price of admission to a museum or a gallery. Significantly less than it costs reserve a sporting venue or go paintballing or go-karting or bowling or golfing or to an amusement park or get concert tickets or whatever else people do for fun.

If someone can provide me a thoroughly fun 90 minutes for $8.99 that's a good deal. In fact if you took those 90 minutes worth of good ideas and padded them out to 4 hours I would consider that a much worse deal. If spending $10 on a fun evening by yourself seems too expensive then the issue is you being poor, not others being bad with their money.

The problem with this game isn't that it's $8.99, it's that it's a bad game.

I agree but "it's only the price of a coffee" was a common defence these type of developers used back in the early iOS days to reject all types criticism. You can enjoy the game, not ask for a refund, and still say it's not worth $8.99 because of x, y, and z.

I'm triggered because I went over this argument like 10 years ago in the iOS scene and their argument was basically "lol you're poor" as if price alone made something more arty (even though I'm sure I spent more money than most of them). Then it all went full F2P as if many people didn't warn them... I see similar happening in the Oculus store for VR and I don't want to see the same result.