New Steam Refund Policy Gives Your Money Back “For Any Reason”

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We all know that Steam is Valve’s bread and butter, with its regularly insane sales that annihilate consumers’ wallets and purses, its 9.5 million concurrent users, and more. However, a new update to their refund policy has us scratching our heads, because it’s equally as insane.

The newly updated refund policy (via PC Gamer) really opens up the conditions for which you can get your money back. “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,” reads the updated clause in the policy. Valve goes a step further in saying “It doesn’t matter.”

To be clear, the new refund policy is applicable to not only games, but also downloadable content, in-game purchases, bundles, pre-purchases, and even money that you’ve transferred into your Steam Wallet. The only discernible condition is that you must request a refund within two weeks of the original purchase, and you must have used the content for less than two hours. Even if you’re outside of those parameters, Valve is being a good guy Greg by saying: “You can ask for a refund anyway and we’ll take a look.”

Should you request a refund, the policy states that “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 […] 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.”

The only content that seems to be out-of-bounds for this new policy are movies or redeemed gifts, and certain third-party DLC, like if the content “irreversibly levels up a game character,” however this sort of content will be “clearly marked as nonrefundable” before you hit the purchase button.

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Owner and Publisher at Niche Gamer and Nicchiban. Outlaw fighting for a better game industry.


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