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

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Yeah two notoriously bad games. One a new IP, another a new installment into a RPG universe that had emded 5 years ago. As far as I know Andromeda sold alright, too.

Yes, that's why I used them as my example, they're still in living memory and most of us remember how quickly they slashed the prices of those two because they were underperforming. They were expected to sell way better and EA didn't wait a year until they evaluated the total sales to see if they were successful or not, they did so within weeks which is perfectly normal because for most games, most sales will happen within the first few weeks. Of course there are always outliers and exceptions that bucks that trend.

That new God of War seemed kind of cool and it sold well, what would you say was the half-life of interest* for that one? Three weeks before half of the customers had moved on to something else? The influx of new buyers won't offset people playing something else at that point.

*It's a dumb term that I just made up, but I can't come up with anything better, but you sort of understand what I mean right?

 

[CHARizard]

Wrestling Empire.

If you liked that you should check out his best creation.

 

[Resident Evil]

Just coming to say in this thread that Hylics was less then or up to 2 hours and is one of the best rpgs I’ve played in recent days, if a game is good enough people won’t refund it.

 

[Moths]

Dunno this game smacks of left his assignment to the night before. Theres series on youtube of people making games that surpass this in 24 hrs as a challenge

And they release it for FREE

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Dunno this game smacks of left his assignment to the night before. Theres series on youtube of people making games that surpass this in 24 hrs as a challenge

And they release it for FREE

Many of which can be found on itch.io too.

Instead of crying about your game being returned because it's too short, just make an achievement you can only get if you get two hours into the game. At least a few more people will keep it than.