Can you please outline for me what the policy was before and after the EU intervention? It’s my understanding that it changed nothing about the actual refund process, which has always been flexible, but was purely about the wording during checkout. Correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t refund a game that I played less than 2 hours, and I’ve been on steam for 17 years.
Edit: Looking at the EU regulation, it appears they don’t actually require Steam to offer refunds once you download/play the game. So their longstanding global policy is better than what is required by EU law. I believe they EU action just forced them to parrot the stricter EU refund guideline (14 days without downloading) during checkout, meanwhile they still provide their regular relaxed policy of allowing you to download and play for up to 2 hours and still refund it within 14 days.
Maybe if you had an egregious example of a game not functioning at all, they might issue a one off. But I was denied one trying to refund one of the cod black ops games that crashed within 10 mins of starting a match for weeks until they finally patched it.
I’m in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that’s how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says “You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase”, and then they can do whatever they want.
Steam’s refund policy is their own. And though it’s mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it’s also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people “just refund”.
Can you please outline for me what the policy was before and after the EU intervention? It’s my understanding that it changed nothing about the actual refund process, which has always been flexible, but was purely about the wording during checkout. Correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t refund a game that I played less than 2 hours, and I’ve been on steam for 17 years.
Edit: Looking at the EU regulation, it appears they don’t actually require Steam to offer refunds once you download/play the game. So their longstanding global policy is better than what is required by EU law. I believe they EU action just forced them to parrot the stricter EU refund guideline (14 days without downloading) during checkout, meanwhile they still provide their regular relaxed policy of allowing you to download and play for up to 2 hours and still refund it within 14 days.
Before? Their policy was: we don’t issue refunds.
Maybe if you had an egregious example of a game not functioning at all, they might issue a one off. But I was denied one trying to refund one of the cod black ops games that crashed within 10 mins of starting a match for weeks until they finally patched it.
And even that was an upgrade from: never.
I’m in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that’s how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says “You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase”, and then they can do whatever they want.
Steam’s refund policy is their own. And though it’s mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it’s also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people “just refund”.