Steam refunds, from the developer side

Steam's refund policy is generous to players: ask within 14 days of purchase, with under two hours played, and you get your money back, for any reason. Valve's own description is that refunds remove the risk from buying on Steam. For most games that is a safety net that builds trust in the store, and therefore sales.

For a game you can finish in ninety minutes, it is a design constraint. GameDiscoverCo's 2025 survey makes the point in numbers: games with an average playtime under two hours had a refund rate of 12.6%, against 7.4% for games averaging over 50 hours. The obvious reading is that short-game players are acting in bad faith. The better reading is that the policy treats a finished two-hour game and a two-hour sample the same way, so a short game has to give players a reason to keep it after the credits.

The rules that touch a game developer, from Steam's refund page:

• Games: within 14 days of purchase and under two hours of playtime. Requests outside the rules can still be submitted and reviewed case by case.
• Pre-purchases: refundable any time before release; the 14 days start on the release date.
• Early Access and advance access: any playtime counts towards the two hours.
• DLC: within 14 days, if the base game has under two hours of play since the DLC was bought and the DLC has not been consumed, modified or transferred. Some third-party DLC is marked non-refundable.
• In-game purchases in non-Valve games: refundable only if the developer has enabled it, which Steam shows at checkout.
• Bundles: refundable if nothing has been transferred and combined play is under two hours.
• Keys bought outside Steam: not refundable through Steam.
• Abuse: Valve may stop offering refunds to an account it sees abusing them. Buying before a sale and re-buying at the sale price is not abuse.

Valve publishes no benchmark and says rates vary widely by game. The best public numbers are GameDiscoverCo's, from almost 150 developers and publishers who shared lifetime unit refund rates in late 2024:

A refunded sale is removed from your revenue. Steamworks' Sales & Activations portal shows revenue before deductions, in near real time; the monthly report, which is what Valve actually pays, takes refunds and chargebacks out. GameDiscoverCo found one publisher's refund rate by dollars was the same as or slightly higher than its rate by units, so plan with roughly the same percentage of revenue.

In a revenue estimate, use 10% unless you have your own data, and more for a game under two hours, in Early Access, or selling heavily in a deep sale. Our Steam revenue calculator takes refunds as one of its inputs.

In Sales & Activations, select the package and open Refund Data from its links. You get the refund rate, defined as units returned divided by units purchased in the same period, for the recent week, month or lifetime, and players' reasons grouped by category, each expandable to their written notes.

Valve's advice is to use the reasons to find what to fix: bugs, balance, or expectations the store page could have set earlier. Read the notes, not just the categories. "Crashes on launch", "not what the trailer showed" and "too short for the price" each point to a different fix.

Expect noise. Valve warns the week view is very volatile, especially after launch and after discounts, when some sale buyers change their minds after the sale has ended.

From Valve's notes and the developers in GameDiscoverCo's survey:

• Bugs. One game in the survey fell from a 25% refund rate at launch to 13.3% over a year of fixes.
• A page that oversells. Players refund what the trailer promised and the game did not deliver.
• Deep discounts. Sale buyers who bought on impulse refund more.
• Events that do not fit. One developer saw refunds rise slightly after joining Steam events outside its audience.
• Region. Developers reported higher rates from some regions, one citing 28% from Chinese players for its game.
• Short playtime relative to the price.

1. Make the page match the game. Screenshots from real play, a trailer that shows the first minutes as they are, an honest description of length.
2. Fix launch crashes first. Technical problems are refunded within minutes, and the first week's rate is the one players' reviews follow.
3. Get the system requirements right. Players with weaker machines refund what they cannot run; test on a minimum-spec machine.
4. Give a short game reasons to stay: modes, unlocks, achievements, a harder difficulty, a New Game+.
5. Price for the length. Players judge a two-hour game at $20 harder than at $5; the under-$5 group in the survey refunded least by price.
6. Choose events that fit. A themed fest or sale whose audience wants your game brings fewer regretful buyers.

A low refund rate is not the goal; a good game is. Visual novels and puzzle games, often short, had the lowest refund rates of any genre in the survey, which suggests the cure for refunds in a short game is not length but satisfaction. And refunds are part of why players buy at all: a store where any game can be returned is a store where players try games they would otherwise skip. The cost of a refund is the price of that trial.

Flockbay is a free AI game builder on the official Godot engine. Its playtest links send your build to testers and bring back crashes and errors, with a clip when the tester allows it, before players can refund over them. Its Steam page drafts system requirements and store copy from the project itself, so the page describes the game you built. Hosted playtests and the drafting are free in beta until 1 December 2026.