Valve apparently had to process over 300,000 Steam Summer Sale refunds on the very first day of the sale, due to gamers taking full advantage of the time limit. The Steam Summer Sale started a week ago and will continue offering deals on a huge number of games until July 5.
The Steam refund system was implemented nearly two years ago, allowing gamers that purchase games off of Steam to be able to refund them if they turned out to not like them. In order to take advantage of the refund, players have to have owned the game for less than two weeks and have to have played it for less than two hours to be eligible.
The Steam Summer Sale refunds mean that at least 300,000 refunds were processed through Valve on the very first day, likely as gamers bought and tried out games before deciding they didn’t like them and asking for refunds. Considering how cheap so many games are during Steam sales, and with refunds normally being processed in around a day, it’s a good system that these gamers have figured out.
There are very few games that actually have demos available on Steam, and so simply buying the game and then asking for a refund if it turns out either your computer can’t run it or you don’t like the game is a solid strategy.
Since the first day the number of Steam Summer Sale refunds has actually gone down into the 200,000 range, but that’s still a large number of gamers that are still buying games, playing them for a little bit, and then asking for their money back.
While we don’t necessarily recommend you doing anything similar during the Steam Summer Sale, it is a good way to spend money instead of wasting it on a game you’ll either never play or just plain don’t like.
