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Thanks to Australian customer protection laws, Steam has some of the most lenient refund policies among digital software stores. You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours. Plus there are frequent sales. Don’t underestimate the psychological impact of making people feel “I have to buy this now or the deal will be gone.”

I genuinely do not know how to get a refund from the google play store or the apple equivalent.

(The downside of the Steam policy is it makes Steam unviable for games that can be played in full very quickly. Develops can also game the system by dragging out early game so the player is over the refundable time by the time they reach the rough parts. But this is for another discussion.)

There's no problem getting a refund for apps in my experience, I've done it a handful of times when I've changed my mind and it was easy and fully automated.

> Thanks to Australian customer protection laws

Source? I always thought this was a general Steam policy, as it's available pretty much anywhere.

> Thanks to Australian customer protection laws, Steam has some of the most lenient refund policies among digital software stores. You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.

I think it’s actually worldwide?

Yes, but they did it because Australia forced them to.

I doubt that, EU consumer rights already stated that "the consumer shall have a period of 14 days to withdraw from a distance or off-premises contract". Steam purchases count as "digital content" in that case.

[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/83/oj#art_9.tit_1

Got a source for that?

The ACCC did win a $3M AUD judgement against them for their refund policies:

* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)

* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)

> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.

> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.

> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.

Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...

I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...

Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...

But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.

I got one from the play store once - I called them. The conversation was a bit surreal ( they kept telling me it wasn’t their fault , before eventually suggesting a refund )

Sony does not follow this, how are they getting away with it?

They got sued (and lost) back in 2014 in Australia for not having a refund policy: https://www.techradar.com/news/heres-valves-official-stateme...

My point is, this is just something Steam does, not something they are required to do (at least not everywhere).

> You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.

The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:

* You have played for less than two hours.

* You bought it in the past two weeks.

https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

Anecdotally, as a counterpoint, I asked for refunds on the iOS App Store maybe twice in a row and since then every purchase was met with a dialog where I had to confirm I waved my right to a refund.

This was over a decade ago, so may be very outdated. I don’t even think in-app purchases were yet a thing. I wasn’t trying to abuse the apps (I pay for software) and was in fact trying to use the refund policy to allow me to buy more apps because I could test without the fear of paying for duds. Their policy had the opposite effect and I basically stopped buying on the App Store.

In practice I've sometimes encountered that in the form of "either waive your right of withdrawal or else wait 14 days to download your content/activate your licence/etc.", though.

This is not true for digital purchases when you waive your rights to withdraw which you have to accept for digital storefronts. See under point 19).

Just for clarification: they are required to refund customers in some jurisdictions (apparently Australia was the reason, indeed), so they might have decided to do this for everybody

a) out of the kindness of their heart (i.e. good public image), or

b) just not to deal with complexity of introducing different refund schemas per region.

Probably a mixture of both.

I don’t think that would fly in any EU court?

Also

c) to preempt additional regulation in more jurisdictions

Steams refund policies are still fairly weak IMO. For many games, two hours doesn't really tell you much about the quality of the game and Steam also knows that many users will not get around to even trying games they pick up within the two weeks that they grant refunds for.

Imagine you went to a physical store and bought something that turned out to be broken after a couple hours of use and the Store just said too bad. Absolutely unacceptable there but Steam reserves the right to and does often refuse refunds that are not within their stated limits.

You also don't have as much leverage with Steam as you do with some random store. If a merchant fucks you over you are supposed to be able to reverse the transaction but with Steam trying that with even one game will get you banned from the store completely - and with Steam being a not-quite monopoly that means many games will literally be unavailable to you.

AFAIK you also still cant refund Steam wallet "cash" into real money so if you bought a Steam wallet card in order to buy a Game and then want to refund that game you can effectively only exchange it for other Steam products which is not a real refund.

IMO Steam gets a lot of undue credit just for not being quite as terrible as the competition.

You can doubt whatever you want but the fact is Steam did NOT offer refunds until they were sued in Australia and lost.

As for EU consumer rights, look at Article 16 (m) in the link you posted:

> Exceptions from the right of withdrawal

> Member States shall not provide for the right of withdrawal set out in Articles 9 to 15 in respect of distance and off-premises contracts as regards the following:

> [...]

> (m) the supply of digital content which is not supplied on a tangible medium if the performance has begun with the consumer’s prior express consent and his acknowledgment that he thereby loses his right of withdrawal.

It would and does. There is little (EU-wide) legal protection for consumers of digital content.