Question Of The Week [July 9th 2025]

Q: Do You Refund Games You Don’t Like?

A: Back in the early days of gaming, the 80’s and 90’s it was quite normal to return games for a various amount of reasons. You could bring a game back and get a full refund if let’s say your parents found out you bought the game when they told you not to, or if it was too violent, or boring or you just didn’t like it. It was common to have games returned and get your money back all the way up to around 2002ish. I remember the first time I went to a GameStop to return a game I wasn’t into, and they told me it was opened and the new store policy was to not accept returns for opened games.

This quickly became commonplace and it was nearly impossible to return a game after it was opened. Although it sucked at the time, I could definitely see why. People would buy a game, play it and then return it for a full refund, or worst case, store credit and do the whole thing over again, it was basically a scam to get free games.

So it was kinda shocking when Steam implemented a basic but pretty fair refund system back in June of 2015 and allowed people to refund a game if it was played for less than 2 hours and also within the first two weeks of purchase. It was kinda mind blowing. Coming from owning a game store and having lived on the other side, I never really used it. Not until years later, maybe around 2019 was my first refund, and it was mostly due to buying the game on Steam, and then having it be free on Epic Game Store the next day. I didn’t play it and ended up refunding it without any hassle.

Then just this week, I ended up taking advantage of my second refund on Steam. I bought a game that I ended up playing for around 45 minutes and just not being very enthralled by it. It was fairly basic and it had several technical issues within the first several minutes of the game. I tried to enjoy it and play it, but I put it down and would come back to it later…. That later never came. I was on the last day of the refund window and I knew I was most likely never going to boot it up ever again. So I ended up requesting a refund. I quickly got an email saying it was processing, and then maybe an hour later another email from Steam saying I was refunded.

It was quick, easy and I ended up using that refunded purchase, to buy another game I had much more fun with and enjoyed and even finished. I really liked that I was able to refund something that I had issues with, and knew that I was probably never going to come back to it. It takes a lot for me to give my time to games now, as there is just so many to play, and a lot of games now aren’t made very well.

I saw someone saying they basically use the refund system to “Try before you buy”, but they were abusing the system and buying and returning dozens of games a week. That’s unethical and not what the system is for. But if you genuinely are interested in a game, and end up just not enjoying it, and wanting to get your money back, I don’t see an issue with it. We used to be able to do it all the time, same thing with being able to walk out in the middle of a movie and ask for your money back.