Valve, the publisher of Steam, has spotted players who are taking advantage of the special framework of early access for video games to obtain refunds – even with many hours on the clock. The rules have changed.
Valve is signaling the end of playtime for players who are eating into its reimbursement system. Since April 24, the American video game studio has applied a brand new, more restrictive policy in order to close a legal breach. This specifically concerned games in early access on Steam.
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On the video game purchasing platform, the refund policy provides for accepting requests if two conditions are met : you must not have played the title for more than two hours and the request must be made within 14 days after the date of the transaction. In force for years, this framework is relatively well-known.
There was, however, a loophole: these two criteria only applied to officially released games. Everything that happened “before” was not counted. You could therefore acquire a game in early access, play it for hours, and still get a refund. If the request occurred within the 14 day post-launch window, it was good.
On securities with a very long lifespan, this could be a boon for free riders. An example ? Baldur's Gate 3. Larian Studio's RPG was released on August 3, 2023. However, it was also entitled to a very long period in early access, which began on October 6, 2020 – two years and ten months.
Of course, Baldur's Gate 3 in early access did not offer as complete an experience as the final game – especially since after the release, it was entitled to numerous fixes and patches to enrich the gaming experience. However, even with incomplete gameplay , a few clever people found their account there to make the most of it.
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Playtime in Early Access is playtime, period.
The rules now change for pre-purchased titles with their preview access. “ The playing time accumulated during the preview access period will now be taken into account in the limit of the total playing time not to be exceeded to benefit from a refund », it is written in a note from April 24.
We can guess that these abuses were obviously frequent enough for the studio to decide to intervene. From now on, it will no longer be possible to argue that early access was not real playtime. Or to claim disappointment because the game is not “complete” in this state, and that it does not therefore does not correspond to expectations.
However, there remains a weakness, which has not yet been addressed by Valve: a game in early access does not reflect the final state that the title will have. Features are missing, others may disappear because they are ultimately irrelevant, and so on. The disappointing state of a game at one time may prove satisfactory at another time.
However, this cannot necessarily be seen within this narrow window of two hours, which is very short to form an opinion. Valve has chosen to integrate play time into early access to this two-hour rule. Perhaps an intermediate path was possible, providing for a countdown, but offering a little more time.