Getting a Refund from Steam
Comments(1) Another threshold breached: For the first time, I have requested and received a refund on Steam, something that has become a lot easier lately.
It wasn’t a big refund. A mere 49 cents. This sale price is of course a big part of why I bought the game in question; that’s well within the “I don’t know much about this game, but I’m not risking much by buying it” range. I don’t want to identify it here, but it was sort of arcadey, and 49 cents is slightly less than the cost of two plays on a classic coin-op machine, so that was informing my sense of value here. And in fact I did get two substantial plays out of it, so under most circumstances, I’d call it even and leave it at that.
But I started having misgivings about the game when I first started it, and saw the logo was flanked by two images of Pedobear, like heraldic supporters. This is basically the creators proclaiming “Our tastes and sensibilities were formed on 4chan”, which is to say, identifying themselves as jerks. That’s a minor matter though; I’ve played plenty of other games by jerks. But apparently the flanking images are randomized, because the next time I went back to the main menu, I got Pepe the Frog. This is more or less equivalent to putting swastikas in your logo. This is the creators all but outright telling me they don’t want my money.
I mean, yes, Pepe has a history as both a character and a meme that predates its appropriation by white supremacists. I can easily imagine that including it here was meant as just another 4chan shout-out, and that the developers simply don’t mind being mistaken for neo-nazis. This would make it an act of stupidity rather than a declaration of fascism, but you know something? Even in that scenario, I’m comfortable with asking for my 49 cents back. If I’m wondering whether it’s a sincere expression of solidarity with the alt-right, there are definitely going to be alt-rightists who read it as definitely sincere, and take it as yet another sign that their ideology is acceptable now. I don’t want to support even that, not even with such a pittance.
At any rate, the refund request form was very straightforward, except for the bit where they ask the reason. There’s a list of options, and none of them are “it turns out to expresses support for political loathsomeness”, useful though that would be for a number of games. I can report that I received one Steam trading card drop before the refund period expired, something that I didn’t think was supposed to be possible. Also, I’ve experimented a bit with the consequences for the Steam UI in general, and can report that it doesn’t quite know how to deal with Achievements for games that you no longer have.
Having been through the process once, will I be more willing to exercise it in the future? I don’t know. It bucks decades of habit. Even when it turns out that a game won’t run on my system, my reaction is typically “I’ll probably get it running at some point, maybe after an upgrade”. We’ll find out.
The only time I ever used it, there was a game I’d just purchased that then popped up in a Humble Bundle I was otherwise interested in. I requested the refund, got it a little while later, bought the bundle and re-registered the game to my account. It didn’t make me any more inclined to use refunds really. If I’m not sure about a game, I’d rather buy it cheaply than pay a significant amount and refund it a couple hours in. If I never end up playing the game, well, at least I’m supporting game developers financially. I’m okay with that.
This does sound like the sort of scenario where one wouldn’t want to provide that support, though.