The Epic Store Updates its Refund Policy

The Epic Store is poised to take 2019 by storm, and it’s off to a pretty dang good start: it’s got a lot of good publicity (guilty as charged), more than a few exclusives, and the many benefits it offers developers is exactly the kind of thing that leads to more games, which in turn, leads to more players.

But the Epic Store hasn’t been perfect: there have been a few nagging issues that have clung to the new storefront for a while now, specifically the issue of refunds. Until recently, the Epic Store had a “no refund” policy that was a real step backwards compared to Steam, which let you refund just about any game as long as you met some broad criteria.

But indeed, Epic seems to have realized this, and over the weekend instituted a return policy nearly identical to Steams, giving players a bit more freedom with their games and their money.

Here’s how it works as a refresher: Epic will let you refund a game “for any reason” as long as you’ve owned it for less than 14 days and you’ve played it less than two hours. But you can also get a refund on any microtransactions you may have spent in the game, as long as they haven’t been “consumed, modified, or transfered”. Preorders can be canceled anytime (see how easy that is, Nintendo?), but if there’s a playable version of the game out then even if it’s in beta it counts towards the two hour/fourteen day rule.

Getting banned from a game will disqualify you from getting a refund, and the Epic Store will not let you “abuse” the system, although they specify that if you buy a game and it goes on sale soon afterwards, refunding it and getting it at a cheaper price doesn’t count as abuse.

All-in-all, some pretty fair rules. I guess it would have been nice if they had given us more time with the game to decide if we liked it or not (I think three or four hours would be a bit more fair), but I understand why they’d do it this way: some games just don’t last that long.

So good news, generally.