Steam has a refund policy that, on paper, protects the consumer. You buy a game, don't like it, play less than 2 hours, you've got 14 days to get your money back. Simple enough. Except one indie developer just showed, with the numbers to back it up, that the same protection can be used for something else entirely: playing an entire game for free. The case comes from Zoroarts, creator of *Paddle Paddle Paddle*. He shared that 21% of buyers requested a refund, more than 55,000 requests, despite 90% of reviews being positive. So it's not a quality problem. People like the game. The problem is that the game is short enough to slip right under the refund window. *Paddle Paddle Paddle* was designed to last around 4 hours, and some players take anywhere from 5 to 20 hours to finish it, depending on how comfortable they are with the genre. But a speedrunner, or just someone more experienced, can clear the whole thing in 1 to 2 hours. Which lands right inside the limit Steam allows for automatic refunds. Zoroarts shared a screenshot of a review that sums the whole thing up pretty well. The player wrote that it was a great game, said exactly that, finished it in under 2 hours, and requested a refund right after. It's not even a case of someone unhappy trying to get their money back. It's someone who enjoyed it and decided not to pay anyway, because the system lets them. He also mentioned getting comments like "make a game that's longer than 2 hours" when he brought the issue up. Which is telling, honestly, because it shows part of the community has already normalized this as some kind of legitimate design critique instead of, well, a way to play games for free. Not everyone agreed with him, either. In the discussion that followed on X, plenty of people argued the problem isn't Steam's policy, it's the genre itself. If you build something meant to be challenged by speedrunners, it's kind of obvious some players will run through it just to beat the record and then request a refund to brag about it. Others said Steam already penalizes people who repeatedly abuse the feature, and that this is an isolated case that doesn't represent how most players actually behave. Either way, Steam's own policy is pretty direct about it. Guaranteed refund within 14 days, as long as the game hasn't been "consumed, modified, or transferred" and playtime doesn't exceed 2 hours. Valve even gives examples of legitimate requests: a computer that doesn't meet the minimum requirements, an accidental purchase, or just trying an hour and realizing it's not really your thing. But it also warns, without much subtlety, that it can stop offering this if it feels the system is being abused. Zoroarts' suggested fix is kind of obvious once you think about it: show the average completion time right on the game's store page. That way buyers know what they're getting into from the start, and "it's too short" stops working as a refund justification, since the information was right there. The game, by the way, is currently on sale. $3 instead of $5. I keep thinking about what this means for people making small, well-made games. A short, honest game is, in a way, at a disadvantage inside this system, because its completion time can land almost exactly inside that 120-minute window Steam allows. And that creates a weird incentive: artificially padding a game just to survive the refund policy, even if it hurts the pacing the developer actually wanted to deliver. Steam has never hidden the fact that its policy is generous, almost no questions asked. It's probably one of the reasons it's still the platform of choice for most PC gamers. But cases like this show that generosity comes with a cost, and it's not Valve paying it. Source: https://cybernews.com/tech/steam-refund-policy-free-game/