Steam Offering Refunds Now!

It’s happening. It’s happening—it’s finally happening!

This is… well, I don’t want to oversell it, but it is pretty big: Steam is officially willing to offer full refunds for games purchased over their service!

Okay, first, the news itself: like we said, Steam is willing to let you return any game you own, for any reason, so long as a few conditions are met beforehand. It can be because you don’t like it, or your computer can’t handle it, or the multiplayer is broken… anything. But you can’t just return games willy-nilly, no sir: if you’ve owned the game longer than fourteen days, or if you’ve played for longer than two hours, then you can no longer get a refund.

This offer applies to all DLC, Valve-produced In-game Purchases, pre-ordered games, raw funds in your steam wallet, or bundles, so long as the combined play-time of all the games in the bundle is less than two hours, and you didn’t get any non-refundable DLC.

You cannot, however, refund movies, gifts, any game you’ve been VAC-banned on, or non-Steam games in your Steam Library.

You can get a refund by emailing Valve at help.steampowered.com and telling them what you want returned. Be warned, however, that abusing the system (it’s to help remove risk from buying games—not an offer for unlimited free demos) will lead to the refund privilege being taken from you.

That settled? Now.

This is a pretty big deal. For as long as people have had digital games, there has been discussion and debate among PC Gamers and developers alike what rights gamers had over the games they bought. The ownership if something entirely digital, like a game or a musical track, is a messy legal area, particularly when companies claim a digital game is a service (like Google Maps) rather than a product. Long ago, one of the main battles of PC gaming was trying to argue for a gamer’s right to “own” their games, and one of the ways that ownership was exercised was with the ability to issue refunds.

The debate has dabbled down in recent years, but still, this is a very exciting day for us. The question, however, is why now? Could it be due to the recent release of Hatred, and a flooding of dissatisfied/angry customers? Or perhaps the growing popularity of Good Old Games Galaxy, which has had the ability to ask for refunds for a long time now? It’s impossible to say, but it’s a very, VERY welcome addition to the Steam service.