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As Totalbiscuit once said, stop fucking buying pre-order games. Don't pre order, don't buy pre-release, fuck FOMO and fuck these greedy practices. People still pay for it so greedy publishers(?) keep doing it Edit: I did say devs yes however it's usually not the devs doing this. Regardless of who makes the final decision it's fucking up the gaming industry

In Australia, due to our customer protection laws, Steam is forced to honour the 30 day return policy, for faulty or misleadingly advertised products. I believe the EU has similar laws.

For those who watched the first part and are worried, don't be, he left out an important piece of information. Steam counting the first two hours of advanced access does not mean you are "stuck with it" if you spend two hours trouble shooting or the game does not work. It simply means the refund isn't 100% guaranteed. You have to explain why you are asking for a refund and a human being will look at your reason then decide if a refund is warranted. And from what I've seen, refunds for things he mentioned tend to get the thumbs up when manually reviewed. So if you are worried this new policy will affect you, it won't. Unless you were one of the people abusing the loophole to play 10+ hours of the game game then get a refund.

TOO ELABORATE ON STEAM REFUNDS: The 14 day purchase and 2 hour playtime still apply according to their version of the announcement and rule changes that are now updated, BUT any playtime ACCRUED will count before RELEASE will be counted. Also, the 14 day rule has a addendum that states the 14 day part of the refund rule does not start until release date and the game can be refunded prior to release if still under the 2 hour playtime. Hope this helps for those that wanted to read a clarification of this rule if you are like me and had a hard time following.

So players will be able to know from Steam reviews if a game is broken before release? That hurts. Guess the corps gotta ship working games then. How awful.

Such a sad state the gaming industry is in right now. Though, they did put themselves in this situation to begin with. So many potentially good games wont get made.

The gaming bubble is bursting. Companies kept pumping more and more and more money into games and their development and as a result, all those shareholders demanding more and more and more return on their investments. And with people's wallets being spread to thin just trying to survive, gaming has seen a serious drop in consumer spending. Honestly i am surprised it hasn't happened sooner. I can only hope that the industry learns a lesson from this. That you can't just endlessly pump money into things and expect endless growth. The market must be shared if it is to evolve past this boom and bust cycle.

This goes beyond gaming. Money is drying up all over the place. Entertainment is just one of the first things to go in tough times.

2:46 to skip the ad.

1st story: Honestly I thought this was how it was already done and its probably what Valve intended in the first place. The reviews part is good for us and bad for publishers while the refund part is the reverse but its probably how things ought to be anyways. 2nd story: Elite was already a massive grind fest so them selling a way around the grind was inevitable in my opinion regardless of what they already promised. I imagine this might get them new players but anyone who pays to bypass that initial grind probably isn't going to stick around for the long haul because most the rest of the game is that same kind of grind anyways. Also clearly bad for us. 3rd story: That's just sad but not surprising giving the current circumstances; how many 'good' and 'great' games have publishers backed only for it to blow up in their face and them to lose their investment? Granted some of that was because of the publisher demands but still.

I am glad that Valve fixed that Advanced Access issue. It was insane that Starfield was able to launch at full price and just not allow reviews on 90% of the internet for a week because they told the review sites that the game was not ready for reviews yet. That was really broken, no idea why anyone thought that was a good idea. As for refunds, sounds fine. Steam has historically been very accommodating and understanding. That is is not automatically refunded after you played the game for a week is completely reasonable.

There are youtube channels dedicated to buying the game, speed running, getting every achievement, and then refunding it. They normally already own the game on another account, but still entertaining to watch.

In the majority of cases, if you spend 2 hours in a server queue/not actually playing the game steam will still issue the refund, you just have to be clear with your reason for requesting the refund.

I got shafted by Steam with Payday 3. I was in the server ques for hours, crashes and everything. I tried refunding it at 17 hours "played" and even told them that it was unplayable. Refused refund. Uninstalled the game and have never played it again, nor will I.

Relabeling 'early access' as 'advanced access' also means the classic defense of 'oh, well it's easily access! You can't judge this game yet it's not done!' Falls flat. Better make sure the game you're releasing in advance is ready

Regardless of Steam's refund "policy", in Australia, businesses must either repair, replace or refund if a product is faulty. In the case of a subscription, a cancellation of the subscription. Valve tried to take away gamer's basic consumer right in Australia some time ago by stating they didn't do business in Australia (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission took them to court), the judge didn't accept their bs excuse and they were fined for breaching Australian consumer law. As far as Elite Dangerous is concerned, I don't know if the game is dieing, but Fdev's decision to sell ships stinks of desperation. Their share price never really recovered after the Odyssey debacle.

your sponsor clip is really loud compared to the rest of the video

we simply cannot resist a knife gabe thumbnail

They still needs to do something about games that we bought that has been permanently gone from our library.

3rd story: I rather have 100-150 indie studios funded then 1 AAA.

It even happens to studios with well-known and received games. Mimimi Games, the developers of Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes III had to self-publish their last game, and they managed with help from the German government in form of a grant. And then it did indeed become their last and final game. Because while it was well received by critics and fans, the sales weren't enough to fund development of a new project, and they couldn't find funding elsewhere. That's why they closed shop late last year. Some games, might be great in their niche genre, but if that genre doesn't generate enough sales, your game can be as good as possible and still not make enough money. Pretty tragic.

It's also down to consumer spending... a lot of us simply don't have the money any more. I live alone, and, 10-15 years ago, I was buying anywhere between 5 to 10 full price games a year, regularly... sometimes more. Let's take my food bill as an example, probably was getting away with 30 quid a week. Now... be lucky if I buy one full price game a year, and thats only guaranteed hits like God of War etc, something I KNOW is going to be a good game, or the odd DLC or a module for DCS, or a new plane for MSFS2020. My food bill, anywhere from £75-100 a week now. I simply can't afford to take gambles on indie games I may or may not like, or pre-order AAAs. With the cost of living crisis, I no longer have the disposable income I once had. My wages have gone up a couple of quid an hour in the last 15 years, my bills have trippled. I can see publishers just not willing to take a risk on a mid range game these days, because there's a strong chance they won't make their money back. This current trend of releasing every game into early access these days and not finishing it for another year, or releasing it half done and utilising day 1 patches, and "fixing it live" has hurt the games industry too. What happened to actually finishing a game before releasing it. Me, the consumer wants an enjoyable product from the get go, not a half baked, bug filled mess I've got to wait a year to actually enjoy.... No wonder people aren't buying games and being a lot more careful with what little money they have.

Oh boy I wonder when they will close the loophole of companies scamming customers. * Crickets *

Why Age of Sigmar does not sell could also be because it is Age of Sigmar. Would have bought a Warhammer Fantasy right away not a fan of the Endtimes.

mmm the morning coffee industry news *this comment is a sacrifice to algorithm

@BellularNews will you be talking about the BSG and Escape from Taskov $250 doc scandal?

What Frontier have done pissed all over the rep they had. For example, people who paid 90+ quid for the 'lifetime expansion pass' don't get early access despite that. The length is also a kicker: For the past 3 months FDEV had been building a hypetrain and now... Well, 3 months early access. FDEV have had financial issues because of the nature of being publically-traded.

Steam's changes are justified and sound in my opinion. It closes a loophole customers were abusing because the refund rules were most likely written before advanced access was a thing AND it allows reviews during said early-access so that the customer may make a more informed choice prior to purchase. It's simply Valve saying stop abusing our policies, check reviews before you purchase something that would warrant a refund

Keep in mind even after the 2 hour window you can still get refunds for certain issues. I had one such issue with a game that had a major control issue I could not work around. By the time I had confirmation the issue would not allow me to properly play the game on my system the time had lapsed. I submitted my evidence to steam support along with a legal template letter citing the UCC right to void sale if inspection of the product reveals a major defect. I got the refund.

We also have BSG asking $250 for a pay2win package in Escape from Tarkov, which includes an offline co-op mode DLC. At the same time, since 2017 BSG was selling Edge of Darkness edition that was supposed to get ALL DLCs, but not this one apparently. Drama is still going on btw, game's Discord is on fire, even moderators are striking.

If they wanted to make money on new ships and not be greedy goblins they should have bundled 8 or 9 new ships to be earnable in-game together with some new content and sold it as an expansion pack.

To translate for Star Citezen; "This will give players a better opportunity to fork-over heinious amounts of money for pay-for-power advantages that we will continue to push onto our playerbase for the purpose of giving them FOMO (fear of missing out), so they will spend more money in the hopes of not falling behind. We will then proceed to release even mroe packages with upgrades for those exclusive ships, and we can price them however we like, because the people who bought the ships are going to buy them anyway because they're already invested. Not that we care, we're just happy that your giving us money for a service that doesn't even respect you X;'D"

Worried advanced access might affect your refund? Don't pre-order and buy it ffs. Wait for reviews. It's your fault rushing in and getting disappointed in your own impatience.

I've always considered the two hour play timer something to keep in mind when I buy a game I'm not already set on, I'm not sure why it would be any different for "advanced access". Sure a game can be broken or simply not be functional with your hardware etc, but that wouldn't make me less cognizant of the time I'm spending with the game "running" on Steam and eating away at my refund timer. If anything this should be bad news for developers because even "advanced access" players will be part of that potential pool who will have to refund the game and probably won't bother to follow it and see if it ever gets fixed at a later time.

one key information left out is that, while playing for more than 2h does exclude you from *automatic* refunds, you still can get a manually reviewed refund when you're well over the 2h mark or owned the game for over 14 days

With regard to the refund policy more generally, on the one hand, 2 hours is a really stingy window for a refund and puts a lot of pressure on devs to make a strong first impression and design their game pacing a certain way. On the other hand, if Steam added more hours (4 hours or 5 or whatever), we'd see another trend, away from compact, smaller game experiences, because if you can see a game's story in 4 or 5 hours, you'd then be able to refund it. But then again, Angry Joe's "FOUR HOURS" catchphrase exists for a reason...

@Frontier That's not advanced access. It means the real release date of the Python MkII is May 7th.

The new refund policy might actually work in our benefit in the end. When enough people get burned by crappy pre-release games and day 1 patches then publishers might actually stop doing it. Just maybe, but there is always a chance.

I will say that steam support is very generous with manual refunds after the 2 hours. I played AC1 for 4 hours, trying to get a setup that would work well with gamepad because I wanted to play it on my TV. Said that was the reason why I was refunding and that I had only played the first couple of missions and they issued a refund within a few hours of sending the ticket.

I find it weird how hollywood is transparent about how much they spend on films, but the games industry is very obscure about it's budgets.

Do we even need any new games at this point? There are already so many I want to try one day that my lifespan is not enough as it is.

I hope developers realise what's happening to Paradox's reputation and start choosing other partners (if they can) because I, and most of my friends are now avoiding any games associated with them

2 hour window doesn't apply to australia, rally your lawmakers to make refunds work as long as there's a decent reason.

Darktide is an example of advanced access counting towards the time played is anti consumer. They made players think they were holding back a lot of content for a launch update, but that was the mostly full game. This is anticonsumer changes.

the audio on your advertisement is way too loud

I'm very upset about the Elite changes w/the new ship. It's some bullshit. Ships should be released for all CMDRs at the same time, especially if the ship is better than what's available. They are trying to strong arm us to spend more money, which is super easy. If they wanna sell cosmetics they should make a lot more and cut the price down like how Helldiver's has it. I gladly spend more money on that game cause it's very very good and the prices are actually micro.

acetaldehyde isnt effectively broken down by those with "Asian Flush". The drink might grow pretty huge in places with drinking problems like Korea... the alcohol still greatly lowers the quality of deep sleep

Steam's 2 hour policy for refunds have always been bullshit, because any game that kicks over to a 3ed party launcher to download updates (Paradox games, most MMO's) start ticking your refund time as soon as you open the launcher even though the launcher is going to patch for more than 2 hours.

6:36 I'm pretty sure most Steam users didn't even know this was a "feature" they could rely on, automatically presuming they were ineligible for refund due to play time. If anything this closes a loophole for publishers and even makes Advanced Access less attractive to them. Honestly, "ÄAA" and "Live Service" games should just have a bigger refund window. Proportional to the price of the game, even! Starts at 2 hours minimum and increases in tiers from $20+.

money is drying up everywhere. concentration of wealth affects everybody.

What Frontier is doing is a brand new business strategy for an MMO. *Pay 2 Lose microtransactions.* Pay 10£, get a ship that can't defeat anyone in PvP. 👌

these rules are for automated refunds. you can still convince them to give a refund. i have not heard of a refund being denied when there is a legit complaint.

You have to go into it knowing that you are willingly entering new, unexplored territory and if anything happens you're the one liable because you knew the risks. Is it bad that people will need to think harder before pre-ordering a game? I'd prefer it if people only did that when they are extremely interested in the project/product so I don't know that it's a bad thing. A game's quality should be reflected in its sales, and not have those sales inflated too much by pre-orders going in blind.

Steam's changes are justified and sound in my opinion. It closes a loophole customers were abusing because the refund rules were most likely written before advanced access was a thing AND it allows reviews during said early-access so that the customer may make a more informed choice prior to purchase. It's simply Valve saying stop abusing our policies, check reviews before you purchase something that would warrant a refund.

Not too surprised with time counting with advanced access games because there have been several games where people got refunds no matter how much play time they accumulated one being Starfield. The one thing that did surprise me is that Valve not doing it sooner.

Just to remind, you can play some single player games with Steam closed by opening it through an exe file instead. This wouldn't count to your playtime. Plus, when you refund the game, it doesn't disappear from your PC. So, even if you can't play it through Steam or receive new update, you can still launch its exe without problem.

Got Elite Dangerous free but never played it. All the set-up was about getting all my bank details so they could sell me %$$/ I gave up before getting to actual gameplay and have never been back.

Well, there's always ESG funds. Oh wait...

That last studio coming from Lionhead, their style reminded me so much of dungeon-keeper

Did you increase your volume during the advertisement?

Problem with games like Elite Dangerous is that once you are done... Well you are done, unless you find way to generate revenue there is really no money to develop it beyond maintenance...

There are things that gamers can do to stop corporate abuse, like: - Don't buy games that abuse customers. - Don't buy games from companies that abuse their employees. - Don't buy early-access passes and/or games. - Don't trust shows (e.g, Blizzcon, etc.), they are made to hype you and just portray a small percentage of the whole product. - Take what reviews say with a grain of salt. In particular, live with the philosophy: "Gaming is just a hobby. If you don't get to play a game, it is fine...it will not hurt you." There is much more that can be said, but this is the basis.

Time saving tool would be something like a discount coupon you can buy with real money that'd simply lower requirements of whatever it is for in game (so 50% coupon means 50% less rep and materials needed). Combine with boosters for stuff you grind upward (like reputations) for honest time saving. Now the most important part: make them reasonably priced and don't fuck with f2p progression in order to funnel players into spending more than they want to. You'll end up with happy f2p players that have time (or at least patience) to grind stuff the proper way, happy rich players that can simply reduce amount of grind required with their extra disposable income and plenty of good will all around. (money making can be thought of as skill just as great reflexes is in action game or cleverness in strategy games) I dont think advance access to ships is that big of an in-game issue since ED has solo play mode anyway (though using psychological tricks like that is scummy on it's own).

Is it just me or was the Ad very much louder than the open and after? I have KZfaq set to 50% volume and it was very noticeable. Great vid!

Hopefully this encourages developers to make more demos for their games. I'm honestly sick of being forced to abuse steam refund policy just to see how a game runs on my computer

It's your choice to preorder and pay to play early. You made bad life choices, now live with them. You don't have to preorder a digital product, you choose to.

Does Valve also provides protection or cash back when the pre-release has troubles with servers being down or bugs that stop the access till its fixed?

What's stupid is after a game is fully released the "early access" package is STILL available if you wanna waste an extra $5-15 for "early access" for a game that's already 2 weeks old.

A sponsorship to encourage unhealthy drinking habits and ways to get out of the hangover, that’s…really not a great look. That’s advertising an addiction and a ‘cure’ for it, which…I mean…we’ve had hundreds of those, none of them have actually done anything.

big part of this decline is 70-250$ games, couple years ago AAA games were 30-40 and it was booming

You know what really makes companies the most money? A good, polished game, one where when you buy it, you actually own it. Crazy how all the publishers loosing money are the ones stepping away from this age old strategy.

I’ve only done early access when it’s at a discounted price and good reviews. Valheim was just that for example. I often end up buying at least one more copy anyway.

Between the news with Tarkov and this, it's obvious what the picture is, corporate greed, obviously, a huge obstacle of bourgeois to OUR FUN!!!!

We need to force games to be more transparent in early access ... the prerelease for PGA 2k23 was amazing and made me give glowing reviews and i even talked my friends into giving it another chance. then when it dropped it became paid grind full price freemium battlebass nonsense and i felt so bad

a possible benefit of 2 hour timer starting in early access is that MAYBE people will eventually stop buying early access because they could be playing 2 hours of a rushed game. Maybe this can help kill early access and advanced access BS. We need more market forces like this. I don't actually have a problem with early access... I have a problem with taking money for broken games and never fixing them... even at "launch". Indies get a pass; but AAA's DO NOT.

I love that everyone was up in arms about the Elite Dangerous' jumpstart ships and then the stats came out and everyone realized that they ain't anywhere near 'pay to win'.

What if those developers from Flaming Fowl Studios call up Peter Molyneux and buy / get the rights to the game Black & White and make a good VR version of Black & White, it will both give every gamer an awesome game and secondly introduce a boost in popularity to the VR platform, because let's be honest, Black & White is the perfect title for VR.

The issue is, the funding they were using actually caused some games to be worse mainly due to that funding having requirements for use, which is never a good thing when it comes to development. The other problem is, that there is constantly someone who has no idea what they are doing trying to run the projects, or as we heard about several projects in the last 5 years, they had no real vision or goal until months before release which made the whole development period feel lost in a fog turn into crunch crunch crunch. Early access sadly has its place simply due to cooperate greed, but I find it a bit concerning that Steam decided to close the loophole as it allowed consumers to get a lot more information about the game prior to buying it themselves, or gave those who did pay the extra bit for early access the ability to get money back when they realized the state of the game was an absolute mess that had no right releasing in the first place. I would rather have seen Steam put in a clause that early access consumers wouldn't get a full refund, but could still get a refund. As in they wouldn't see their early access premium refund, but could still get the cost of the base game refunded at the very least.

In theory, I could get behind some idea of "pre-built" builds, especially in e.g. RPGs with highly complex builds where there's a lot of theorycrafting (you can just follow someone else's build that you found online, but it would be nice to have this supported in-game). But what I'm talking about wouldn't be something you pay extra for, and it wouldn't save you playtime - you'd still need to grind for all the things in that build. So that sounds nothing like what Elite are doing.

can we stop whining about dying studios and actually start looking at reality? The gaming market is hopelessly oversaturated. The cake everybody is fighting over is not endless, in fact, it is getting smaller, since gaming is a luxury article. So, you either have to live from bread and *work* for a while in order to earn yourself a piece of the cake (like Larian), or you just blindely hope that someone will simply hand you a piece. And if this hope does not become reality, you starve. That is life! Sad (maybe) but true.

Anything but stop drinking...

Regarding the customers affected who would have a pre-release bad experience: they can just as well refund then and there and see if they wanna re-invest post release if it seems like it has improved. It’s on them to actively play the in development product; if they really had such a bad experience that warrants a refund they should have refunded it then and there.

Never seen one of your videos before, but I really liked this. Good insight, good explanations.

straight up giving a dislike cause FUUUUCK that audio balancing for the sponsor read

Ah yes, the decline of Steam. Fantastic. P.s. Terrible take saying this "loophole" "had to be closed". This was nothing but an anticonsumer move.

Valve: 2 hours minimum on game release to refund. Early / Advanced access: Valve: No! This isn't how you are supposed to play the game.

It's almost like publishers pushing out unfinished games to try and satisfy shareholders is biting them in the ass.

btw, for Elite Dangerous python. It would take 41.25 weeks of maximum arx earning to get the Python Mk II.

>People keep their money instead of blindly spending it on games "The well is drying up. There's a lot of games we won't be seeing as a result." Yeah. What did everyone think would happen? This is half the point. Some games won't get made because everyone is withholding their money, but that's what has to happen. Nothing will ever change otherwise.

Watching for the last few weeks, and I'm honestly glad I chose to go onto another career path rather than game developing. I knew, from the experience and stories from my professors that jobs were hard, and I've seen stories of all the layoffs, but seeing how the industry is going now, when I would have been out there trying to get a job with my fresh degree, makes me real glad I stopped spending money on it. I am happier with what I moved on to anyways, but looking at this now makes me even more glad I didn't choose to persevere through anyways, because that would have been a lot of money on a degree I wouldn't end up using.

For 60 years, capital costs have been effectively 0 as part of the world starting globalism, and many things have been possible, and here we see Michael not grasp the coast of globalism. Companies haven been able to afford to pay fully sustained staff, but they could see more profits if they fired staff and use freelancers / contractors, never mind how devastating it has been on the skilled workforces. We are now seeing the claims of the 60s-80s were all wrong. An industrial nation causes net population shrinkage, not growth, and we are less than 25 years away from the human population hitting its peak on Earth, and we are already seeing something no one in the workforce as seen since WW II: skilled labor cost and demand both going up in parallel. Money is not drying up for any industry, but the post WW II era of FREE capital has now ended. No industrial nation has EVER seen a non-cost capital economy like the one centered on the western nations, and we are not going to see it come back for at least half a century, if it ever comes back again at all before the invention of non-scarcity economy. In short, the days of treating human capital like disposable dung are over. You do not run your operations like a death camp any more, because the cost of disposable / contractor / freelance labor are simply to expensive. We do not see any other industry plan to operation with 1000 employees for 5-7 years, then dispose of 95% of that labor. Buying your capital through interest free debt is dead, and rebuilding labor pools through 18 month termination cycles between projects is dead. The game industry needs to stop wearing diapers and look at companies that operate some of the MMOs, or games like Palworld and No Man's Sky: you manage your "human capital" in an ever repeating cycle of capital maintenance instead of human expense. Or, if you like some of the older vocabulary, it is times for businesses to evolve or die. Yesterday is gone, and it is not coming back, just like all of those baby boomers just took all of that free credit out of an evolving economy. They day of Indie company may very well have arrived now, if the corps of the last 20 years decide to be the dinosaur instead of one of the next generation's flexible mammals :o

I don't know how I feel about the Steam refund policy changing. I was thinking it made perfect sense, 2 hours is 2 hours and it's been that historically, but I didn't think about multiplayer titles where 2 hours "playtime" could just be people sitting in a queue to play because of the demand on the game servers. That's not exactly playtime, but it's still playtime.

To be fair to Valve, although this is going back many years, before Proton, I had a game that was supposed to run under Linux. It would not start up. Being a bit techie, I tried various fixes before I reported an issue. I cannot remember whether I asked for a refund or just help but I did contact Valve and explained the situation the following day and pointed out that that I had a grant total of 14 minutes playing time which was just "It starts! Opps, no, it's crashed again." The refund was given just like that. No arguments. In that clear case, despite my hanging onto the game for longer than two hours, where the game was clearly not working, there was no problem at all. What is interesting with, although I am only an occasional gamer, Proton on Linux has let me run, to date, anything I have purchased on Valve.

Such a shame what Frontier have decided to do in their desperation to make more money- they have basically /doubled/ the ARX (paid currency) prices of almost everything in the game store. Any logical person would be able to see that this is going to have the complete opposite of the desired effect. Now the paid content that was already right on the verge of not being worth it has now doubled in price to now be decidedly absolutely not worth the cost. If they had /halved/ the ARX costs instead, so many people would be clamoring to buy ARX, to get all the cosmetics that just haven't been worth paying for in the past, that it would probably crash their damn servers. Instead they just ensured beyond any doubt that it's absolutely not worth buying the in-game currency by making everything prohibitively expensive. This will probably go down in history as the final nail in their coffin.

And Age of Sigmar is mostly hated in the Warhammer community. But I don't understand why Flaming Fowl don't just crowd fund.

ed should mark any prebuilt ships with a border of silver or gold depending on how powerful they are over their normal brother ships

This 'loophole' basically highlights a segment of the market that basically want Netflix style 'rentals' ie the Gamepass model. There are plenty who really don't care to own and just want the quick experience and call it a day. If Valve doesn't do this, MS probably will.

Kinda crazy that loophole of that caliber existed

I think instead of "closing the loophole", what Valve should have done is extend the window from 2 hours to like... 4 or 5 hours. Because if you're buying into a game before its official launch, you have no idea what might go wrong. You could literally spend an hour trying to get the game to work, then have less an hour to play it before your refund would need to be done manually.