Steam recently updated their refund policy allowing gamers to return any game, as long as it meets certain criteria (played the game less than two hours and owned it less than two weeks). If you don’t meet the criteria, you can still ask for a refund and Steam will manually approve or disapprove your refund request.
Since the new refund policy launched around a week ago, many developers (mainly small independent game studios consisting of 3 or less people) have been stating that the refund policy is cutting into their sales. But I believe in the long-term Steam’s refund policy will increase game sales.
I believe more gamers will be willing to part with their money to buy a game. This is because they know that if they do not like the game, they can simply return it within 2 hours/2 weeks. Steam’s prior refund policy was quite notorious and gamers were aware of that. They knew they would have to either research a game prior to purchasing or risk losing the money, as it was near impossible to get a refund on a Steam.
Now with the new policy, gamers buying more games will increase the sales for developers. However, this will not be for all developers. Now, games that are good will have the opportunity to increase the sales without doing anything, but games with poor gameplay mechanics, art, or anything else will have a greater risk of losing sales. This is because gamers will expect a certain standard of quality from their games now. They expected this was quality before the new refund policy but because it was so difficult to get a refund prior to the change, most people usually accepted that they made a wrong purchase.
So here is the overview of what I think will happen with Steam’s new refund policy:
- Gamers are more willing to buy new games
- Increased sales for good quality games
- Decreased sales for poor quality games
- More sales for Early Access games
- More people will start the game as soon as they purchased it compared to before Steam’s new refund policy
- New games developed will start to have at least 2+ hours of game content
These are just my views, a game developer who is not selling or has sold a game on Steam.