Valve’s new Steam policy addresses refund loophole
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Valve has updated its Steam return policy to close a loophole that some gamers have been exploiting.
Now, Steam has introduced an ‘Advanced Access’ label to games that are purchased and played before their official release date, as outlined in a new Steam Community post. This is effectively an expansion of Steam’s standard refund policy, which allows you to get your money back as long as you only played the game for more than two hours within the first 14 days of purchase.
But while Steam’s two-hour/14-day policy has been around for nearly a decade, it didn’t take into account the increasing number of titles that offer early access, often as part of more expensive versions sold by publishers. For example, the Deluxe Edition of this year’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was available on January 30th, three days before it was released for everyone else.
The problem with this, though, is that Steam would only start counting playtime on the main release date (in this case, February 2nd), meaning people could have put as many hours into Suicide Squad as they wanted before getting a full refund.
With the Advanced Access label, Steam is ensuring that users can’t exploit the early release period to play significant portions of a game for free.
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