If you try to return a game outside of these limits, there's a good chance your request will be rejected.Īnd when it comes to the two hours of playtime, Steam counts every second the game application is open as playtime. To return a game, you can't have owned it for more than two weeks, and you can't play it for more than two hours total. However, there are limits to how long you can have a game before returning it. All you have to do is submit a request, and the game will be taken out of your library, and your money will be refunded. If you're unlucky enough to experience buyer's remorse early in your gameplay experience, Steam will painlessly return your money.

That's why it's a good thing that Steam, the biggest digital game retailer around, offers refunds for purchases you're not satisfied with. Newman said that the reasons for return were led by 'not fun' followed by 'bad performance,' which he said was 'pretty fair.'Ī few developers commented that a 6% return rate is about normal for Steam, but it can spike to 10% during sales.One of the problems with video games is that it's hard to know if we'll like a game until we buy it and play it. Luckily, the game has sold more than five million copies since Facepunch Studios launched it in 2013, and Steam did not start its refund policy until just before its Summer sale in June 2015. He did not mention how many of those came after the Steam Sale started. Steam has not revealed exactly how many of those requests turned into actual refunds, but Rust developer Garry Newman posted on Twitter that 329,970 refunds had been issued for the game, totally almost $4.4 million. The sale has not changed Steam's refund policy: It will issue a refund for any reason, but a purchaser must play less than two hours of the game and submit a request within 14 days to be eligible for a refund. Apparently Valve was expecting the deluge, as the support page says responses to those requests are averaging between 48.72 minutes to 1.47 hours, which is actually down substantially from the 1.35 hours to 1.53 days when the requests were around 49,000. Currently, Steam has received about 205,000 refund requests in the last 24 hours.

Previously, refund requests have fallen into a relatively normal run of peaks and valleys over the past 90 days, but as the sale kicked into high gear, the number jumped dramatically to more than six times the previous high. Late last week, with the launch of the Steam Summer Sale, the refund requests per day spiked at a more than 300,000. The Steam refund system raised some eyebrows in early May when the official support page showed it was processing more than 49,000 refund requests a day.