Valve Reveals New Refund Policy on Steam Games

Written by Brandon Hofer on June 02, 2015

News: A new refund policy has just been launched which takes some of the risk away of buying games through the service.

Steam has just launched a new refund policy that takes the risk away from buying games, as long as you don’t abuse the service. After updating Steam earlier today, I was informed that Steam had updated their return policy. The new policy is as follows:

“You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.

It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within fourteen days of purchase, and the title has been played for less than two hours. There are more details below, but even if you fall outside of the refund rules we’ve described, you can ask for a refund anyway and we’ll take a look.

You will be issued a full refund of your purchase within a week of approval. You will receive the refund in Steam Wallet funds or through the same payment method you used to make the purchase. If, for any reason, Steam is unable to issue a refund via your initial payment method, your Steam Wallet will be credited the full amount.”

This is a great move by Steam and something that both Microsoft and Sony need to adopt. For those of you who will try and abuse this new policy though, you might lose your right to a refund:

“Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.”

That last part is great news and is similar to the “price guarantee” policies a lot of brick and mortar places like Best Buy have where you can buy something from them and if it happens to go on sale soon after your purchase you can get your money back and purchase the product at the sale price.

What do you think about Valve’s new return policy for Steam? Tell us what you think below.

source: Steam