It's hard to nail down a fair refund policy for video games, beyond hardware issues, because so much comes down to taste. Steam's, which relies on playtime and purchase length, is decent, but there's an inherent flaw for shorter works that an indie dev is pointing out on Twitter, in the wake of tens of thousands of lost sales.
The game in question is Paddle Paddle Paddle, a quirky bit of friendslop in which you guide two people downstream on a raft. One person controls the paddle on one side, another on the other - or you can do both yourself, for a bit of Qwop-type chicanery.
It looks fun, and it's quite short, clocking in at under two hours to complete the whole thing as is. As that's the threshold for Steam refunds besides owning the product for two weeks, you can guess the predicament this has created for solo developer Zoroarts.
This should not be possible @Steam Would be cool if you could finally do something about your refund policy... Got dozens of reviews like that and 21% refund rate even though the Reviews are 90% very positive...Thats over 55,000 Refunds btw... pic.twitter.com/fSiuHjGRnDJuly 5, 2026
"This should not be possible Steam," he says in a Twitter post. "Would be cool if you could finally do something about your refund policy. Got dozens of reviews like that and 21% refund rate even though the reviews are 90% very positive."
He includes a screenshot of a review calling Paddle Paddle Paddle a "Great game," but notes that it was completed in less than two hours, so the person refunded it. Zoroarts goes on to say that the grand total of refunds comes in at "over 55,000," though it provides no graphs or other evidence of this claim.
Nonetheless, it's an uncomfortable quandary for a release like this. It's a small project, designed to be played in an afternoon, and then replayed after for better times and such, but because of Valve's blanket policy, someone can take it back without question after a single play-through.
There's a fundamental dissonance at work, and it's costing small teams genuine sales. If this has you curious, Paddle Paddle Paddle is currently 40% off. Just don't return it if you actually like it.
