Microsoft Testing Refunds for Xbox One Digital Store

Now this is an interesting development.

Two years ago, Steam did something long overdue and brought a refund system to Steam, allowing users to return their products (no questions asked), as long as you’d played them for less than two hours or had them for less than two weeks. It was far from a perfect system, you still had to file a manual ticket and under two hours might not be long enough to figure out if you like a game (granted, any longer and you could likely beat some of the shorter indie games on the platform), but it was definitely a step forward for customer rights, who for a long time were told that digital games were a service and thus developers didn’t owe them a dang thing.

But while Steam is no doubt the biggest marketplace of games for PC, other digital distribution retailers, namely the PlayStation Store and the Microsoft Store, have been left wanting for that feature for quite some time… but now, proving once again that the Xbox One was a grower and not a shower (makes sense if you think about it!) Microsoft has taken the step Sony has been afraid too and has secretly started alpha-testing a new digital refund service for Xbox One.

While it’s not public yet, it works in much the same way as Steams: you have two hours or two weeks to figure out if you like a game, and if you don’t, you can return it with no questions asked.

Again, this is merely an alpha test, and it’s always possible that Microsoft won’t release it to the public, but that seems really unlikely… especially now that the test has been leaked to the public. The goodwill now is strong, but if they step back from it, well, then it’ll just be a disaster.

But we’ll have to see.