GOG Galaxy 2.0 and Playnite 5.3

Note: Some of the information in this post is outdated now. Deal with it, nerds.

Last Friday, I finally got my invitation to the GOG Galaxy 2.0 closed beta. This major update to digital PC game distributor GOG's optional desktop client allows users to import information about games purchased from or registered to other services, thus providing a unified front end for divided game collections. The point, presumably, is to address or to mitigate some game consumers' reluctance to stray outside of the Steam bubble due to their anxiety about not having all of their games in one place. As I noted in a previous post, this is a pretty smart move for GOG, because most potential GOG customers are probably using Steam already, and might not be willing to start using a second store unless doing so is made convenient.

It should be noted that, while GOG Galaxy 2.0 will allow you to import your Steam game library and launch those games from within Galaxy, the games are still launched through Steam, so having the Steam client installed is still required to play Steam games. The same goes for other services as well. The new Galaxy launcher isn't going to let you avoid installing other launchers. However, it will help you organize your game collection and see all of your games in one place without opening all of your launchers at once. Much of the functionality added in this Galaxy update will seem familiar to users of Playnite, another desktop application which aims to be an all-in-one game launcher but which isn't associated with a particular store.

On that note, Playnite 5.0, a substantial update, just recently came out of beta. I believe this was an open beta, but I never got around to trying it during the beta phase. The official release of Playnite 5.0 was announced on Twitter last Friday, the same day I got my GOG Galaxy 2.0 invite.

Big Playnite 5 update is now available! https://t.co/nOh6UVBnja

— Playnite (@AppPlaynite) July 26, 2019

Since then, several minor versions have been released; the latest version of Playnite is now 5.3 as of today. Apparently some nasty bugs were fixed — some users reported that their game collection databases didn't survive the upgrade to 5.0, an issue which should now be resolved according to the change logs — so I guess I should be glad that I waited.

I've been waiting for weeks to try GOG Galaxy 2.0, and I've been looking forward to the big Playnite update as well, and I had planned to give my first impressions on each in separate posts. However, having installed both on the same day, I might as well do a single combined post with some comparison. This isn't really a "Galaxy versus Playnite" post — trying to pick a "winner" here wouldn't really be fair because Galaxy 2.0 is still in beta and because Playnite is an open-source application without the backing of a well-known game developer — but I'm interested to see how the two of them differ.

GOG Galaxy 2.0

I already had GOG Galaxy installed on my computer, with a few games downloaded. The GOG Galaxy 2.0 installer, as expected, seems to have replaced the old Galaxy with the new one. I'm not sure if there's any easy way to roll back to the previous version, but nothing appears to have broken. Upon starting up the new version (which is apparently 2.0.4 as of today), I'm still logged in and my entire collection of GOG games is visible; the few games I had installed are still showing up as installed, and I was able to launch one of them.

More importantly, to my delight, it didn't automatically attempt to detect and import games from Steam, etc., that I've installed on my computer. Maybe some people would like everything to be automatic like this, but it would have really annoyed me; I'd much rather choose whether to import games from other services, and when to do so.

However, when I was ready to import some non-GOG games into Galaxy, I found that simply scanning for installed games, or manually importing them, apparently cannot be done. The fact that Galaxy didn't try to look for installed non-GOG games on my computer makes perfect sense because importing games requires connecting accounts. The inability to manually add games by their .exe files is listed as a known issue in GOG's support center, so I assume this is meant to change at some point in the future — as it should, because Playnite and Steam both allow manually adding arbitrary games — but, as of now, it seems the only way to add non-GOG games to Galaxy 2.0 is to use the platform integrations in the settings menu.

Two official integrations are listed:

• GOG.com (connected by default of course)
• Xbox Live

 Meanwhile, five are listed under "popular" community integrations:

• Epic Games Store
• Origin
• PlayStation Network
• Steam
• Uplay

A third section exists to add manual integrations, but I'm not sure how to do this yet. The section contains only a "learn more" link which leads to the Galaxy integrations Python API, and that page includes instructions for deploying integrations into the Galaxy client, but I can find no directory of community plugins aside from the five "popular" ones listed above. Perhaps no others exist yet.

In any case, I love the fact that the API is in Python, because Python is a wonderful language, and if I weren't already using Python every day at work then I might be tempted to try creating my own Galaxy plugins. Of all the languages I've used, Python is by far the most accessible, so it's a good choice for community-made extensions to the Galaxy client.

As for using the integrations which are currently available, it doesn't seem too difficult. Each one listed in the settings menu has a big purple "connect" button which automatically downloads the integration and displays a window indicating which features are included in the integration. These features, one or more of which are implemented by each integration, are as follows:

• Games
• Library
• Installing & Launching
• Achievements
• Game time
• Friends
• Friends list
• Chat
• Friend recommendations

The Steam integration currently implements all of these features except for friends list and chat. In comparison, the Origin integration implements the same set of features as the Steam integration, while the Uplay integration is missing achievements and the Epic Games Store integration is missing achievements and game time. All of this could change in the future, given that Galaxy 2.0 is still in beta, but I don't really care; none of the features missing from any of these integrations are actually features that matter to me. (Friends list integration might be nice, but nearly all of my friends only use Steam anyway, so I'll just go directly to Steam if I want to talk to them.)

From that informational window, clicking "connect" again brings up a log-in page for the platform in question. Apparently log-in credentials for other services are never saved in GOG Galaxy 2.0, so it probably works similarly to Playnite in which each platform's log-in window is basically a browser window and the application only stores some kind of log-in session cookie.

The GOG Galaxy 2.0 privacy notice also seems to indicate that the data enabling each account integration connection is deleted once the integration is disconnected, which seems to imply that there is no permanent account linkage. I assume this means, for example, that GOG will not permanently link my Uplay account to my GOG account if I use the Uplay integration, and will not prevent me from connecting to another Uplay account in the future if I happen to have two Uplay accounts. If this is the case, it would differ from GOG Connect in which Steam account linkage is permanent and irreversible, but the reason for GOG Connect working this way is obvious.

In any case, given that I've already used GOG Connect and my Steam account is therefore permanently linked to my GOG account already, I saw no danger in using GOG Galaxy 2.0's Steam integration.

Upon entering my Steam account credentials (and the Steam Guard authentication code), Galaxy automatically began importing my entire Steam library, which took several minutes because I have several hundred games on Steam. It did not give me the option, as Playnite would, to import only installed games. I suppose that's fine, though. Importing my entire Steam library just happens to be what I wanted to do anyway.

The end result was quite nice, visually. GOG Galaxy 2.0 has two modes for displaying games: a list view and a grid view. The latter is the default, and is more interesting anyway, so it's what I spent most of my time using. All of my Steam games were seamlessly added to the same grid as my GOG games, with all games from both services displaying cover art of the same size and shape. At first glance, this looks a bit nicer than Playnite 4.74, which would download each game's cover art from one of a few sources (depending on availability and user settings) but would not ensure uniform aspect ratio of cover art; this can result in a messy-looking library. If I remember correctly, the last version of Launchbox that I used had the same problem.

However, while GOG Galaxy does its best to display box art of uniform dimensions, sometimes the result is far from perfect. All of the images are guaranteed to line up perfectly, but that's because some of the images are cropped to achieve the desired dimensions. In some cases, wide images are cropped to narrow box art shape, resulting in only part of a title being shown. This can be demonstrated, quite annoyingly, by the Alien Breed trilogy imported from my Steam library (which are also being shown in the wrong order, presumably due to the alphanumeric ordering of special characters such as spaces and colons):

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in GOG Galaxy 2.0.

The lack of suitable cover art for some games isn't GOG's fault, but the cropping is an issue nonetheless. Compare this to the way Playnite 4.74 would display these games. It seems to use the same images as Galaxy, but it shows the entirety of the wide image instead of cropping it. Whether the cropping seen in Galaxy is better or worse is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in Playnite 4.74.

Note that Playnite also displays the games the correct order because Playnite allows each game to be given an invisible sorting title (which, for the first game in the trilogy, I changed from Alien Breed: Impact to Alien Breed 1: Impact). This would be a good addition for Galaxy.

Another problem affecting both applications — but seemingly affecting Galaxy more, perhaps due to a narrower search for images — is the occasional missing box art for some of the more obscure games. For these games, Galaxy just displays the title in a box-art-shaped gray area. Fortunately, images can be added or changed manually, so the missing or otherwise incorrect box art can be fixed with a bit of effort.

As expected, games which I own on both Steam and GOG (of which there are quite a few thanks to GOG Connect) now appear twice in my Galaxy library. (This is the same behavior seen in Playnite after importing games from both Steam and GOG.) It's not a big deal, but I would have liked these entries to be combined, so that I see only one of each box art but still retain the option to launch each game on either platform. To be honest, I'm not sure if I trust any application to pull this off automatically, given the occasional minor spelling differences between platforms for the same titles (e.g., Brutal Legend from GOG versus Brütal Legend from Steam), but even in these edge cases, Galaxy does seem to find the right box art for both copies. Anyway, although seeing two of the same box art for games owned on two platforms can be slightly annoying, it's no obstacle to usability. Hovering the mouse over any box art displays the logo of the source platform as well as the game's title.

Overall, I was pleased with the way things were going, so I decided to dive in completely and connect my Uplay, Origin, and Epic Games Store accounts to Galaxy as well. All games on these accounts were automatically imported to Galaxy as the accounts were connected. In the case of Uplay, in particular, this shows one distinct advantage of Galaxy 2.0 over Playnite; the latter, as of now, can only import Uplay games that are already installed on the computer.

Galaxy was able to find suitable box art for all of my Uplay, Origin, and Epic titles, which don't include nearly as many obscure games as my Steam library. So, aside from some box art issues with a number of Steam games for which Galaxy was apparently able to find only wide images which were then badly cropped, my combined GOG/Steam/Uplay/Origin/Epic game collection in Galaxy 2.0 looks pretty nice.

Each game's metadata can be modified, and this includes several text fields (title, genres, developers, publishers, release date, and tags), three types of images (box art tile, background image, and a small icon for list view), and some other special fields (a rating out of five stars and a checkbox for visibility which allows games to be hidden).

Playnite 5.3

I suppose I should start with a general description of Playnite for those who have never used it. In short, Playnite can import games from various PC game platforms in the same way that GOG Galaxy 2.0 does. It comes with a number of importer extensions which are similar to Galaxy's integrations. The list of importers does not seem to have changed between 4.74 and 5.3:

• Battle.net
• Bethesda
• Epic Store
• GOG
• itch.io
• Origin
• Steam
• Twitch
• Uplay

The importers for Bethesda and Uplay are the least useful, as they can only import games which are currently installed. The others can import games which aren't installed yet. The importers for Battle.net, Epic, itch.io, Origin, and Twitch accomplish this by authenticating with the user's accounts on those platforms. The importers for Steam and GOG are the most feature-rich, and can import games with or without user authentication; in the latter case, the importer requires only a username, but the user's online profile on the applicable platform needs to be made public.

In addition to importing games from each of these platforms, Playnite allows users to add games manually with a fairly high level of customization. Playnite can also launch games using emulators, although I haven't used this feature myself.

The metadata tracked for each game by Playnite includes a large number of general text fields (name, sorting name, platform, genre, developer, publisher, category, tag, release date, series, age rating, region, source, version, user score, critic score, community score, and description), a handful of advanced fields (last played, time played, play count, completion status, "hidden" and "favorite" checkboxes, etc.), three types of images (cover image, background image, and icon), and some other cool options. Playnite can attempt to populate most of these fields automatically by downloading metadata from various sources; doing this automatically after importing games is optional.

Unlike GOG Galaxy 2.0, no log-in is required by Playnite itself, which is not associated with any online store. In fact, there is no such thing as a Playnite account. All of the game data imported by Playnite is stored locally by default. The database location can be changed to a flash drive to make it portable, and apparently it can even be set up to sync with a cloud service like Google Drive (although I've never tried it), but otherwise all of your data will just stay on your computer.

My own Playnite database was only stored locally, so I was concerned about reports of databases being broken by the upgrade from 4.74 to 5.0, but my database seemed intact after I updated Playnite from 4.74 to 5.3 via the "Check for Updates" option in the menu. Either the bug was fixed somewhere between 5.0 or 5.3, or it wouldn't have affected me anyway.

The visual differences between Playnite 4.74 and Playnite 5.3, which are naturally the first differences I saw, are not quite as dramatic as I had expected. I was intially somewhat disoriented by the filter options being moved from a left-hand sidebar to a right-hand sidebar, but it can be switched back to the left-hand side in the layout settings which also control the positions of a couple of other panels. The overall design of Playnite didn't change so much that I didn't know how to use it; all of the familiar things are still where they were, but there are some new additions, like an "explorer" panel which makes filtering by platform slightly easier.

I did notice immediately after the update that the "grid" view, which displays games as a grid of cover art images, was now behaving more like GOG Galaxy 2.0 than like Playnite 4.74, i.e., images were being cropped to fit the cover art dimensions:

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in Playnite 5.3 with "uniform to fill" cover art rendering.

However, the cover art rendering can be changed in the settings. The target aspect ratio can be modified, as can spacing and border settings, and there are four stretch modes:

• None (which does no resizing or stretching, so images are shown at their original sizes and aspect ratios regardless of whether they fit in the available grid space, thus sometimes resulting in grid spaces showing only the center of a game's cover art and other times resulting in images filling only part of the available grid spaces; not recommended but, hey, it's an option)
• Fill (which disregards images' original sizes and aspect ratios, and just stretches them to fill the target size and aspect ratio of the grid)
• Uniform (which resizes images to fit inside the grid spaces while maintaining their aspect ratios; this was the behavior of Playnite 4.74)
• Uniform to Fill (which resizes images to fill the grid spaces while maintaining their aspect ratios, and then crops them as needed to meet the target aspect ratio; this is the default behavior of Playnite 5.3)

I think these are probably all of the image fitting options anyone could want, which is great. Personally, I can't tolerate stretching or cropping, so I've gone back to the "Uniform" setting used by Playnite 4.74:

Alien Breed trilogy imported from Steam as shown in Playnite 5.3 with "uniform" cover art rendering.

This may result in a messier looking grid view, but it avoids messing up the individual images. I suppose there's no setting in which the automatically downloaded Alien Breed 3 image is truly suitable cover art, and it's a shame that this image was chosen by both Playnite and GOG Galaxy 2.0, but in either case, I can just manually replace the image if it bothers me enough.

I suppose the bottom line is that Playnite 5.3 offers more visual customization options than Playnite 4.74. However, being pretty isn't really enough; Playnite needs to be functional as well. It already worked rather well in version 4.74, but it had its bugs, quirks, and shortcomings. I'm sure Playnite 5.3 still has plenty of bugs and quirks, even if I haven't seen them, but at least one notable functional shortcoming has been resolved: filters are improved.

Whereas most filters in Playnite 4.74 were simple text searches — which meant, for example, that one could not filter to games with the genre "Adventure" without also finding games with the genre "Action/Adventure" — the filters in Playnite 5.3 provide drop-down menus for each category, while also retaining the text search option. The ability to select "Action" without also selecting "Action/Adventure" might seem like a very minor thing, and I suppose it is, but being able to select from a drop-down menu instead of typing a genre name is also just convenient in general.

Conclusion

As noted above, I'm not really looking for a winner here. They both work. They're both good. They both have shortcomings as well. At this time, GOG Galaxy 2.0 does not seem to have integrations for all of the same platforms from which Playnite can import games; if there are Galaxy integrations for Battle.net, Bethesda, itch.io, and Twitch, I don't know where to find them (although, to be fair, they'll likely be added later). Meanwhile, Playnite does not have importers for Xbox or Playstation accounts (although, to be fair, the value in console game importers for a PC game launcher is rather limited unless emulation is involved).

Selection of plugins aside, the main reason to use Playnite over GOG Galaxy 2.0 is that Playnite still has more options. More of the game metadata is editable, there are more filtering and sorting options, there are more visual customization options, games can be added manually (including those not connected to any online service, e.g., games installed from discs), and games can be launched using emulators. Launch options and other actions for games can be fully customized as well, and I've used this feature to add menu items for opening specific games' manuals and README files, among other things.

Meanwhile, there are already some compelling reasons to use GOG Galaxy 2.0, even if you're not interested in the Xbox or PlayStation integrations. Being able to import achievements from various platforms will be a big deal for a lot of players (though not for me personally), and the idea of integrated friends lists and chat across platforms (though not currently implemented for any of the integrations I tried) is honestly pretty cool. If all of your friends are on Steam then maybe Playnite's dedicated button to open just the Steam friends list is good enough for you, as it is for me, but that doesn't mean GOG shouldn't aim higher.

I can't reiterate enough that GOG Galaxy 2.0 is still in closed beta, and we should expect to see more improvements by the time it officially launches. The fact that it already has some neat features that are absent from Playnite is impressive. However, the fact remains that Playnite has a considerable head start when it comes to actual game collection management options, and Galaxy has a lot of catching up to do before Playnite is made obsolete. It's possible that some of Playnite's features will never be adopted by Galaxy, and vice versa, so we might never reach a point where one is strictly better than the other. We'll just have to wait and see.

Steam Sale Chaos

Steam's annual summer sale has started. As usual, the summer sale comes with a gimmicky community event: The Steam Grand Prix. In a break from recent (several years') tradition, however, the event does not consist of collecting Steam trading cards to level up a summer sale badge. In some ways, it's a throwback to the Steam sale events that we used to see before the introduction of Steam trading cards. It's just a thousand times more convoluted and broken.

The mechanics of the event are difficult to explain, but I'll try my best.

• You selects one of five teams to participate in a race.
• You have a "Boost Meter" whose capacity increases by 100 for each day of participation and each dollar spent during the sale.
• You complete "quests" in order to earn a number of points which is limited by your Boost Meter capacity.
• Some quests are special actions in select games, worth 10 to 100 points each.
• You can also just play, for at least 30 minutes, any game in which you have ever unlocked achievements, in order to earn an amount of points which scales to the quantity and rarity of the unlocked achievements.
• You spend your points, as well as the corresponding amount of Boost Meter capacity, to gain distance for your team in the ongoing race and to earn a number of Grand Prix tokens equal to the number of points spent.
• You spend your Grand Prix tokens at the "Pit Stop" store, where you can level up your summer sale badge for 100 tokens per level, buy a $5 coupon for 15,000 tokens, or buy other digital junk (like profile backgrounds for 1,000 tokens each and emoticons for 100 tokens each).
• A very small number of random users from high-ranking teams are selected each day to win games from their Steam wishlists.

Needless to say, people are confused by all of this. My explanation is verbose, but the explanation on the official event page is longer and less clear, and there's really no possible explanation which doesn't make it sound completely absurd. You essentially need to go through three kinds of fake currency (Boost Meter capacity, points, and Grand Prix tokens) in order to get your prize from the Pit Stop store.

Perhaps Valve is just trying really hard to obfuscate the very direct relationship between money spent on Steam and Grand Prix tokens earned. Beyond what's given for free just for participating in the sale, it essentially takes a $1 store purchase to get 100 more tokens. The $1 actually translates directly to 100 Boost Meter capacity, but the Boost Meter capacity is exactly the number of points you can earn, and that number is then traded for Grand Prix tokens at a one-to-one exchange rate. Several layers of nonsense exist seemingly just to dress up the fact that each Grand Prix token is a virtual penny. Now, of course, the money in question is spent on games, which you were presumably going to buy anyway, so the tokens are free — but if, for some reason, you just really wanted to accumulate 15,000 extra tokens, you'd have to spend $150 to get them.

The absurdly complicated method of disassociating money and tokens was the first thing about the event that struck me as odd. The second was how points are earned. In all of my recently played games on the first day of the event, the unlocked achievements were worth thousands of points. One game, in which I had unlocked all but a few achievements, was worth tens of thousands of points. But earning tens of thousands of points is meaningless, if your Boost Meter capacity is only 100. Boost Meter capacity, clearly, is the real bottleneck, whereas points — the currency rewarded for playing games, i.e., actually having fun during the event — are so easy to earn but so quickly capped by the Boost Meter capacity that they might as well not exist.

If you try to claim tens of thousands of points from a quest and your Boost Meter capacity is 100, you keep 100 points and the rest are thrown away. I guess this is supposed to be a psychological trick to make you feel like you're wasting something if you don't upgrade your Boost Meter by buying some games from the store. However, I don't think any sane person would actually buy games just to get more points. The end result is just that participating in the event feels unsatisfying. I think the average Steam user (with normal shopping habits and normal achievement completion) would, like me, find that completing a single quest is enough to exceed the Boost Meter capacity. Earning points this way is so much easier than doing the other quests, assuming you've actually played more than a few games, that the other quests are practically meaningless. Completing quests is the only part of the event which actually resembles fun, and the majority of the quests being pointless makes the event less fun, as does the perceived wastefulness of throwing away those imaginary points that exceed one's imaginary capacity.

But so far, honestly, none of this is really a big deal. Steam is a store; of course its interaction with its users revolves around spending money. So the event isn't fun. Who cares? It's a game store; if you want to have fun, then buy fun games from it. However, we can't really blame the Steam community for attempting to participate in something that's plastered all over the top of the main store page. When there's an event happening on Steam, even if it's silly, people are going to try it out, just to see what's going on. But it seems everyone who tried to participate just ended up confused and annoyed. The event itself is confusing, the official explanation of the event is badly written, and one bit of terminology, in particular, has caused a lot of unnecessary confusion.

Those who had more than 100 Boost Meter capacity on the first day of the event, as a result of having spent money on Steam, were surprised to see their Boost Meter capacity drop back to 100 on the second day of the event. Increasing the "capacity" of something sounds permanent; in this case, it's not. When you "boost" your team in exchange for Grand Prix tokens, you spend the points you earned as well as the corresponding amount of Boost Meter capacity. Any unspent Boost Meter capacity presumably rolls over to the next day, but if you fill your Boost Meter with points and then spend those points, you lose all of your Boost Meter capacity and will star the next day with 100 again.

The other major problem with the event is that, even when we understand the rules, it appears to be completely broken. Boost Meter capacity, or so the rules claim, is increased not only by money spent during the event but also by money spent before the event:

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/grandprix

Sounds great, right? You're a loyal customer, and you've spent lots of money on Steam before, so you should get something even if you're not buying things right now. The problem is that many people started with a low Boost Meter capacity despite having a large number of games on Steam. Others report users with very few Steam purchases starting with huge amounts of Boost Meter capacity. The sum of anecdotal evidence posted online, for what that's worth, seems to throw into question any coherent method of computing what a user's starting Boost Meter capacity ought to be.

(It's worth noting that the 2019 Lunar New Year event had similar issues. The tokens given to users at the start of that event were also supposedly scaled to prior purchases on Steam, but based on users' self-reported numbers of tokens received and games owned, it almost seemed as if tokens were given out at random.)

My own personal experience with the Grand Prix event is just confusing. I started with a Boost Meter capacity of 100, despite having over 730 games on Steam. I wasn't surprised, at first; I just figured my Steam store purchases weren't recent enough. Many of my recently added games came from third-party bundle sites, so many those don't count. All of my recent Steam store purchases were made with store credit loaded from Steam gift cards, so maybe those don't count either, for some reason. Maybe adding keys from third-party bundle sites, and gaining store credit by selling Steam trading cards on the Steam market, actually subtracts form a user's starting Boost Meter capacity. How should I know how these things are computed? I just assumed that my 100 was correct.

But then I scrolled to the bottom of the Pit Stop store page (under "Frequently Asked Questions"), and found this:

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/pitstop (while logged in)

Atrocious grammar aside, it says I received 2,000 Boost Meter capacity, but I never did. I'm not sure where they even got the number 2,000 when I consider my recent purchases, no subset of which add up to exactly $20 — but, regardless, it's wrong. I started the even with only 100, so now Steam is lying to me. Others online have also reported starting with 100 despite their Pit Stop store FAQs promising much more.

As a result of everything described above, people are mad about this event. People on the Steam Community forums are mad. People on Reddit are mad. People on 4chan are mad. Nobody is mad about which team is winning the race, or about the individual odds of winning free games; everyone is mad about the completely broken Boost Meter mechanics. The amount of frustration this has caused is actually somewhat amusing, considering that this Grand Prix event is just a stupid gimmick to promote the Steam sale. Keep in mind that Valve could have just done a regular sale — you know, discounts on games, and stuff. They don't owe us Boost Meter capacity and Grand Prix tokens. However,

1. When you present something as a game, people expect it to be fair, and tend to get mad when it's not.
2. When you say you're going to give something to somebody, they tend to get mad when you don't.

By orchestrating a completely optional community event, consisting of users collecting free digital stuff (which is still free even if the amount of it scales with the money you happened to spend on other goods), Valve has made the community feel worse than they would feel if there were no event at all.

Post-Sale Update

After I originally posted about this event, Valve made a number of changes as described in three news posts. These changes included some attempts at clarifying the rules, a new feature allowing participants of one team to "steal" another team's boosts, a "Switch Teams" option, and other unspecified adjustments to address team imbalance. Starting on the fourth day of the event, they also stopped forcing users to throw away over-capacity points gained from achievements. I don't think it really mattered to anyone who had achievements unlocked in a sufficient number of games -- but, as explained above, it was an annoying psychological trick that didn't really make the event more enjoyable, so I can understand why this was changed.

On the third day of the event, they also gave 1,000 extra Boost Meter capacity to anyone who participated in day one and to anyone who participated in day two (i.e., 2,000 to anyone who participated in both of the first two days), presumably to apologize for the sloppy and confusing event kick-off. However, in my opinion, it still remained confusing to the end.

They also considered "fixing" the Grand Prix Badge which was apparently awarding more experience points than intended. I didn't realize it when I wrote the original post above, but this event made it easier than usual for Steam users to level up their Steam profiles. Indeed, even before I had spent any money on games, I was able to level up far more than during a typical sale event, and the levels I gained were nothing compared to those who spent a lot of money during this sale (either incidentally or, perhaps, for the purpose of leveling up). Personally, I don't really care about my Steam profile level, but some people apparently do, and some felt that the ease with which users could level up during this event was causing Steam levels to be devalued. Ultimately, however, Valve backtracked on their decision to fix the amount of experience points awarded by the badge, which shouldn't be a surprise because Valve would seek to please those who spend the most money.

They did remove the ability to upgrade the badge infinitely, capping the badge level at 2,000, but those who had already gotten the badge past level 2,000 were able to keep it.

I suppose the take-away here is that Valve did try to fix the event, and in doing so, made some effort to please everyone. However, I think most users still came away from this event with the opinion that it was a poorly planned and poorly explained mess. First impressions are everything, I guess.

On Game Launchers

If you're a consumer of PC games and you're not clinging desperately to the past, you probably have a Steam account. Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform may have been controversial, when it was first established in 2003 and when the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 launched using Steam for DRM toward the end of the following year — for, at the time, PC games were still most commonly sold on discs, and the thought of digital distribution overtaking physical media was anathema — but over the past decade-and-a-half, those who were resistant to digital distribution in general, and to Steam in particular, have either changed their minds, accepted defeat, or abandoned PC games as a hobby. Digital distribution won, and Steam cornered the market.

Digital Distribution: Deal With It

Of course, some still refuse to use Steam, and some even refuse to pay for digital distribution (whether that means missing out on most PC games or getting them illegally). Among those who do use Steam, however, many believe that the leading PC game store has justified its place at the top, if not earned it outright. As a store and as a download client, Steam is pretty solid; Steam sales are famous for a reason, and the Steam client is a prime example of why digital distribution really isn't that bad.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the good old days when games came on discs. I especially remember entering product keys, manually downloading and installing patches, and needing to put the disc back into the computer every time I wanted to play certain games. Modern digital distribution eliminates these particular nuisances. In many ways, having a fully digital game collection is just more convenient than having a shelf full of discs, so it's no surprise that so many of us have forgiven the fact that we don't really own the games we buy from digital distributors. If Steam ever goes belly up, we will all lose our Steam libraries — but in the meantime, at least Steam games have one-click installation and automatic updates.

Steam's other features help too. Some of them have come to be fairly common in game launchers, such as friends lists and achievements. Others are less common and, when brought together in one (slightly bloated but still user-friendly) package, they make Steam a pleasure to use, even in comparison to other digital distribution clients. Among the Steam client features I've used personally are user reviews, cloud saves, family sharing, in-home streaming, profile customization, group chat, voice chat, an in-game overlay with a web browser, community forums, user-submitted guides for each game, a system for sharing user-created mods, and the ability to add non-Steam games to the Steam interface. (There's also that community market on which you can sell those silly trading cards for store credit, or buy cards if you actually want them for some reason, but I think most causal Steam users ignore that.)

In summary, what was once an annoying launcher for a mid-2000s first-person shooter has become something actually useful that we don't mind having installed. But Steam isn't the only digital distribution platform for games. It's just the biggest. What about the other platforms? Are they worth using?

Everything in One Place

If you just think of each digital distribution platform as a store, it's easy to justify straying from Steam to buy games elsewhere. Whenever you want to buy something, you should at least compare prices on a few different stores. (PC games are no exception; if a game is sold in more than one place, Steam isn't guaranteed to have the best price for any given game at any given moment.) However, a digital distributor is not just a store. It's also an online repository for all the stuff you bought from the store.

Maybe this doesn't matter if you manage to avoid ever downloading anything twice, but digital content is ephemeral and disappears if you press the wrong button, so you might need to download it again. Doing so will require logging in to the account you created at the store from which you bought your digital product. Shopping around and always buying from whichever store has the lowest price on a given thing seems like a good idea, but if you end up using a dozen different stores to buy games then you'll need to keep track of a dozen different accounts in order to maintain access to all of your games.

Most major digital distributors also make you use their client software to download, install, and launch your games, so buying and downloading games from multiple digital retailers also means installing multiple launchers. (GOG is one of a few exceptions, as their games are DRM-free and thus their Galaxy launcher is optional, but if you buy games from Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, and the Epic Games store, you'll need the respective launchers if you actually want to play those games.) Are we okay with having two launchers installed? How about having three or four of them?

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, but a lot of people don't like it. Some see all launchers as bloatware (and would prefer direct downloads of DRM-free games, as from stores like GOG). Others appreciate the convenience of a launcher, but believe this convenience is greatly diminished as the number of launchers increases. The latter view is actually more common, as most of us have accepted the futility of trying to build a fully DRM-free PC game collection in the digital distribution era, and just want to settle for the next best thing: an entire game collection consolidated on exactly one launcher.

I can absolutely see the appeal of it. Having all of your games in one place keeps your collection organized, and gives you one-click access to every game without logging in to more than one online service. On the other hand, you're also ensuring that you'll lose absolutely everything if you lose access to that one account. Those of us who use more than one platform, on the other hand, would at least have something left if we lost our Steam accounts. Maybe it's a good idea to diversify your game collection instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam going permanently offline is very hypothetical, as there's no indication that it will happen in the near future; and individual accounts being banned, stolen, or otherwise lost is extremely unlikely unless the account's owner does something very wrong — but all of these things are still possible.

For what it's worth, if had to tie my entire game collection to one launcher, I would choose Steam as well, and not just because it's the most feature-rich and fully developed platform. Unfortunately for its competitors, Steam's main two advantages: the most games and the most users. The appeal of the latter is obvious; your friends are more likely to be on Steam than on any other digital distribution platform. (GOG Galaxy has a friends list too but, for me, it's empty.) Meanwhile, Steam having the most games tells its users that they don't need to go anywhere else, even if they don't really mind creating accounts on other sites and having their game collections split across multiple libraries, and those who do want to limit themselves to one account and one launcher would be crazy not to choose the platform with the largest number of games for sale.

Competition versus Convenience

So competitors with no hope of competing with the volume of Steam's catalog need to find another way to stand out. GOG has its own niche, specializing mostly in selling old games updated for modern systems and selling them DRM-free. Humble Bundle also sells some DRM-free games (in addition to lots of Steam keys) and, as the name implies, still specializes in limited-time indie game bundles (even though the site has long had a full-time store). Both GOG and Humble also describe themselves as curated in order to differentiate their offerings from Steam's nauseatingly long list of games.

Some other digital distribution platforms might not even be considered direct competitors to Steam, as they act primarily as single-publisher stores — namely Blizzard's Battle.net, Ubisoft's Uplay, and EA's Origin. Playing games which are exclusive to these platforms or require their DRM is really the only reason to use them, but people do use them. These stores don't need to be better platforms than Steam, because they know customers will be drawn in by the few popular games over which they have exclusive control.

Steam's newest and most controversial competitor, the Epic Games store, is similar to Uplay and Origin in that it clearly intends to thrive on exclusive games as opposed to trying to create a better user experience than what is offered by Steam. What makes Epic Games controversial is that they're not content to have exclusive control over the games they publish. They've been spending a massive amount of money on exclusivity deals for other companies' games, essentially paying those companies not to do business with Steam. This isn't a new tactic, but they've used it on games which were days away from release on Steam, as well as games which were crowdfunded with the expectation of a Steam release. The fact that Tencent (and thus, allegedly, China itself) owns 40% of Epic Games doesn't help its popularity, nor does the fact that the Epic Games store and client are so pathetically bare-bones in terms of features because Epic Games is more interested in buying exclusivity than improving the user experience, nor does the fact that Epic Games' recent "Epic Mega Sale" was such a poorly planned disaster that some publishers pulled their games.

I started writing this post because the dominance of Steam, the (often exaggerated) rise of Epic Games, and the benefits of a single consolidated game library versus the need for competition among retailers seem to be hot topics lately. In particular, I've noticed an increase in complaints about PC gamers needing too many launchers to play all of the games they want to play. These complaints often boil down to frustration over games not being released on Steam; the "no Steam, no buy" crowd has always existed, but now it seems to me that they're either more numerous or more vocal. Either way, it's clearly a backlash against Epic Games, driven largely by the company's recent attempts to strongarm its way to the forefront of PC game retail.

Epic Games has done some nice things, both for consumers (like the ongoing spree of free giveaways), and for developers (like taking a smaller revenue cut than many other stores), but they've doubled down so hard on the one thing that pisses people off — buying exclusivity for games that were already advertised on other stores — that it's hard to see their negative reputation as undeserved. And yet, despite their credibility being in the trash, there are people who defend Epic in online debates — vicious Epic-versus-Steam debates which, of course, tend to frame the issue as if we each need to choose exactly one store from which to buy our PC games. I don't agree with that premise, but I'm not in a hurry to give Epic Games any money either, given their business practices. The pro-Epic side often cites healthy competition between companies as a good thing for consumers, but I'm not sure how much that really applies when Epic's main strategy thus far has been to take away consumers' choices regarding where to buy certain popular games. Boycotts rarely work, but I must say I'm inclined not to buy any Epic exclusives.

Epic does have a chance with me, though, if the company can stop acting like a super villain for five minutes. Each of Steam's other competitors has found its place in my game collection by doing what they do best. I made a GOG account for the DRM-free games, a Humble Bundle account for their bundles, and a Uplay account because I wanted to play some Ubisoft games, and an Origin account because I bought some Origin-exclusive games. I even have an Epic account, not because they bought exclusive distribution rights for a game I wanted to play, but because (as noted above) they've given away a bunch of free games and I figured I might as well grab them. So congratulations, Epic, you got your foot in the door. Now find a niche that isn't "games whose publishers were paid to stay away from Steam" and you might really have my attention.

Of course, getting me to create an account is the first hurdle, and getting me to install the desktop client is the second. I haven't installed Epic's launcher, because I currently have enough games to play without the free ones they gave me, but I do have GOG Galaxy and Uplay installed on my PC right now. I don't see why it's a bad thing to have more than one installed. The vast majority of my games are still on Steam, so the other launchers are more seldom used, but having them on my hard drive doesn't bother me. Neither does having my game collection split across multiple services, although I realize that's simply a matter of personal preference.

Solutions

The only real problem I've had with using multiple services is that sometimes I forget which games I own. I'm really, honestly, not kidding. Part of the problem is that I buy so many cheap games that my backlog is large enough for me to forget what's in it, but the inability to see all of my games in one library can turn forgetfulness into wastefulness. When Steam had its summer sale last year, I almost bought Oxenfree and Beyond Good and Evil before realizing that I already had both games, on GOG and Uplay, respectively. I hadn't remember purchasing them because I had gotten both in free giveaways, and I hadn't played them when I got them simply because I was too busy. Not seeing them in my most frequently used PC game launcher, I forgot I ever had them.

Given that I had acquired these games on GOG and Uplay precisely because those stores had given them away for free, whereas both games still cost money on Steam, I don't think using only Steam would have been the right solution. Besides, it's too late for that now. To keep better track of what's in my Steam library in the future, I've started using Playnite, which can automatically import games from various accounts — Battle.net, Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Origin, Steam, Twitch, and Uplay — and act as a front-end for all of those launchers, with the ability to install, launch, and uninstall games. It has some limitations, such as the fact that the current version can only import Uplay games which are already installed (whereas it can import all owned games from other platforms), but it's still pretty nice.

Playnite has been criticized as being simply one more launcher, and thus an unsuitable solution to the problem of having too many launchers. For those who take that point of view, the ability to import all of their games into one of the launchers they're already using would be a better solution. Steam users can import non-Steam games into the Steam client, but that's a manual process, so it's worthless if you have a lot of non-Steam games. The upcoming GOG Galaxy 2.0, a major update to the existing GOG Galaxy launcher, will do much better by including many of the same features as Playnite. This is a pretty smart move for GOG, because many of the people using GOG Galaxy are using it as a secondary launcher alongside Steam. I, for one, don't open GOG Galaxy nearly as often as Steam, but maybe GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be my go-to launcher after I import all of my Steam games into it. It might even make Playnite obsolete.

If GOG Galaxy 2.0 catches on, then there might be a day when every major store's launcher can automatically import games from users' accounts on every other major store. Of course, GOG Galaxy 2.0 will still launch Steam games through Steam and so on, so we'd still need all of our launchers installed in order to make any use of such features.

Conclusions

I've already acknowledged that I think Steam is rather nice while the Epic Games store is, in some ways, obnoxiously bad. However, I'm pretty sure I don't need to choose one. If I really want to play some game that's only on the Epic Games store, I don't need to delete my Steam account in order to play it. Take that simple fact and apply it to every rational consumer, and you'll come to the conclusion that the "Epic versus Steam" debates often miss (intentionally, I'm sure, for the sake of sensationalism): Even if Epic Games' giveaways and exclusive games convince every Steam user to create an Epic Games store account, Steam still won't go out of business. There's really no reason to get so worked up over it.

If you like old games, indie games, or DRM-free games, you likely have a GOG or Humble account (and if you don't, you should). If you happen to like certain Ubisoft or EA games, you probably have a Uplay or Origin account. You might even have an Epic account now, as well, if you noticed the 17 games they've given away for free this year. I have accounts on all of these stores for various reasons. So my game collection is fractured, spread across multiple services, but it saves me the trouble of agonizing over whether a game is available on, or cheapest on, my one service of choice.

Curated Stores

It seems that "curated" is the current buzzword for digital game retailers which aren't Steam.

Source: https://www.gog.com/about_gog

Source: https://www.humblebundle.com/about

Source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store

This is unsurprising, for two reasons. The first is that, while Valve Corporation's Steam can claim to have the most games, its competitors cannot, so the concept of curation is a wonderful way to present a smaller selection as a good thing for consumers. The second reason is that Steam has been criticized lately for its lack of curation. Valve's hands-off approach has allowed some controversial games onto its storefront, from school shooting simulators to visual novels prominently featuring rape. Of course any games which are controversial enough to attract media attention are promptly removed, but at that point the damage to the store's reputation is already done. Controversial games aside, there's also a general consensus that Steam's catalog includes a huge number of very low-quality games. It's true. It does. There are literally tens of thousands of games on Steam, so of course they're not all very good.

The quality of any given game, of course, is entirely subjective, but few people who have looked past the list of best-sellers would disagree that the Steam store contains a ton of shovelware. And, frankly, how could it not? It's the natural consequence of the store's "anything goes" policy, because Sturgeon's law has no exception for video games.

But does it matter?

Whenever I read complaints about how Steam isn't curated, or has no quality control in terms of the games it sells, I get the distinct impression that the complainers just have a bone to pick with Valve, or with PC as a game platform in general. Subjectively, one might think less of Valve for allowing cheap garbage on its store — and for the sake of argument we will assume that everyone agrees on the definition of "cheap garbage" — but, objectively, I don't think the platform's lack of curation is likely to have any negative effect on the average Steam user's experience. A store which sells only the greatest products, hand-picked just for you, sounds great if you're planning to buy every product in the store's catalog, or choose randomly from it. But nobody does that.

There could be a million cheap garbage games on Steam and you still wouldn't be forced to buy them. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn't even know they exist if you don't go looking for them. If a game is so bad (or, to be generous, so niche) that a manually curated store would be likely to reject it, then that game is too obscure to be found on the front page of the Steam store. Such a game is certainly not popular enough to be found in a list of top sellers or anything else which you'll find on Steam without doing a fairly narrow search. In a way, Steam is curated, in that the games most prominently featured on its main page are there because they're notable. The shovelware simply isn't on the surface. You have to dig for it, at least a bit.

Meanwhile, all the terrible games in the world don't negate the good ones, nor does an abundance of awful games make the good ones any harder to find when you can sort by popularity or review score. Of course, now I'm making an assumption about the popularity of "good" games, but I don't mean to imply that only the most wildly popular games in the top ten best sellers are any good. I'm only assuming that any game with an ounce of quality will have higher review scores, for example, than the shovelware about which Steam's critics so love to complain. Despite the nearly non-existent barrier to entry, not every game is equally visible. Moreover, the Steam store isn't just an unsorted list of games, so the idea that the good games are buried under piles of junk simply isn't true.

Statistically speaking, I'm sure there are a few hidden gems which might be deserving of praise but haven't gotten enough recognition to stand out from the rest of the practically endless catalog. So many games are released on Steam every month that, if nobody has ever heard of you and your game drops tomorrow, it might not get any attention at all. Unfortunately, it happens to be the case that quietly releasing your game on Steam simply cannot be your entire marketing strategy if you want your game to succeed. But if you're that inept at promoting your product, your game probably has no hope of being picked up by a hand-curated store with higher standards, so the fact that Steam is open to every other untalented hack of a developer isn't your problem. Marketing ineptitude aside, what constitutes a "hidden gem" is incredibly subjective, so if Steam were hand-curated, there's no guarantee that any hypothetical hidden gem would make the cut.

On that note, although the concept of curation is nice in general, I don't necessarily want a store doing that curation for me at all. I don't need someone to tell me what's good. I'd rather continue to ignore thousands of horrible games, playing only the ones I want, than even once find myself willing but unable to play a game because some company decided that it wasn't good enough to be featured on their store.

No matter how bad you think a game is, someone out there probably likes it. Maybe no one thinks that obscure, low-budget, independently developed game is the best game, aside from the developer's mother, but it probably kept someone entertained, at least for a short time — proportionally, no doubt, to the low price at which such games are typically sold. Small indie games are okay sometimes, if the price is right. Not every game needs to cost $60 and take 60 hours to finish. Sometimes, honestly, I'd rather spend $60 on 60 games that last one hour each.

I've impulsively purchased my fair share of stupidly cheap bundles of games from sites like Fanatical (formerly Bundle Stars), Humble Bundle, etc., and this results in a lot of really bad games in my Steam library, so I'm acutely aware of how many bad games there are out there. However, through these bundles, I've also found some fun games which I never would have played otherwise. It's important to emphasize that these games were fun enough to justify having spent chump change on the bundles from which they came, and I'm not saying I would ever pay $60 for any of them, but that doesn't matter because that's not the space they occupy in the PC game market.

Would I delete some games from Steam if I had a magical delete button? I admit, it would be hard to resist. But the games I would be most tempted to destroy are, I happen to know, very popular among other types of people. I don't understand why people like anime dating simulators, but they probably don't understand why I liked Neon Chrome and Lovely Planet. So if I woke up one day and found that my Steam account had been blessed with that magic delete button, I'd like to think I would refrain from forcibly "curating" the store to suit my own taste.

After all, those anime dating simulators aren't really hurting anyone.

Alan Wake To Be Pulled From Stores

I don't often have an opportunity to mention on this blog that the music industry is awful. Well, an opportunity has presented itself, so here it goes: The music industry is awful.

Two days from now, Alan Wake will be removed from stores, because the licenses for music used in the game are expiring. People who already bought the game should not panic; it's highly unlikely that already-purchased copies will be taken away from customers in the near future, and I've seen no evidence that software updates will be removing any content from those existing copies. If you bought the game on Steam, for example, it will remain intact in your Steam library, likely for as long as Steam exists. Furthermore, the semi-canon sequel/spinoff Alan Wake's American Nightmare will remain in stores, so there's no rush to buy it. However, if you still haven't played the original Alan Wake, your time to purchase a legal copy of the game is running out.

In the meantime, it's 90% off (from $29.99 to $2.99):

Alan Wake sale on @steam_games 90% discount starting 5/13. Game will be removed from stores after 5/15 due to expiring music licenses. pic.twitter.com/y10DPgY8Q0

— Remedy Entertainment (@remedygames) May 12, 2017

I should clarify that Steam is not the only store with a 90% discount on Alan Wake. The tweet above mentions only the Steam store because, as explained in another tweet, it's the only store on which developer Remedy Entertainment can control the pricing of the game. However, other stores want to compete, and other stores also want to sell as many copies of Alan Wake as possible before they are no longer allowed to sell it.

I don't have time to check every online retailer, but I've personally checked two other great stores, GOG.com and The Humble Store, and both of them also have a 90% discount on Alan Wake. Furthermore, both of these stores are arguably better than Steam, because they both offer DRM-free copies. The Steam version (last time I checked) will launch only through the Steam client.

Another difference between the stores is that GOG.com and The Humble Store both have a 90% discount on American Nightmare (from $9.99 to $0.99), while the Steam store still has the game at full price (seemingly by accident) and won't be offering an equivalent 90% discount on American Nightmare until tomorrow. All three stores, however, already have a 90% discount on the series as a whole, so if you buy the Alan Wake Franchise pack on Steam (which is discounted from $39.99 to $3.99), you're effectively getting the 90% discount on American Nightmare as well. I can't strongly recommend American Nightmare, anyway, as my feelings about the game are mixed, but if you're intent on buying it, now is probably a good time.

I can't say this is the best time to buy either of the Alan Wake games, because they were once featured in a name-your-own-price Humble Bundle, which means smart shoppers could have acquired DRM-free copies of both games for only a few cents. But, without a time machine, the current deal is likely the best you'll ever see... unless, of course, you opt for piracy instead and download the game for free, which will be the only option after the game disappears from stores on May 15th.

Regarding piracy, there are times when it is morally (if not legally) justifiable. I went into detail about the pricing, in the paragraphs above, as a public service to those who wish to acquire a legal copy while they can. However, don't think I'm trying to convince you to spend money on the game. Two days from now, it will essentially be abandonware. I'm generally against piracy, but if a game cannot be acquired legally then I think piracy is not only harmless but also necessary for the historical preservation of the game in question. If the publisher doesn't want to sell it, you should not feel obligated to pay for it. The licensed music in the game is certainly not abandonware, but I have no sympathy for the music industry, so I honestly don't care. Nobody who illegally downloads Alan Wake will be doing so just for the music.

In any case, whether you pay for the game or not, I do recommend playing it. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger, though, which is more frustrating now than ever before, because this latest turn of events does not bode well for the anticipated sequel. I'm sure Remedy would like to continue the series someday, but it's probably not happening anytime soon if they can't even afford to keep the first game in digital stores. If I'm wrong and an Alan Wake 2 is in the works, they probably shouldn't release it while legally downloading the original game is impossible, because newcomers to the series might be less likely to buy the sequel if they can't easily play the original game first.

Fortunately, the current state of affairs is not necessarily permanent. If a proper sequel to Alan Wake is ever finished, I suspect they'll renew the music license at that time (or, if we're less lucky, they'll release an edited version with offending music removed). On the other hand, if the franchise has truly been laid to rest and plans for a sequel are permanently shelved, it might be a long time before any more copies of the original are sold. I doubt that Microsoft cares much about the franchise — they never did — so they'll probably be content to sit on the publishing rights while doing nothing with them for years to come.

Steam Sales: The Golden Age is Over

This year's summer sale on Steam ended today. I didn't buy much, despite having $70 worth of gift cards to scratch off and some leftover credit from an older gift card which I never used up. I think it's fair to say I'm disappointed. This was my chance to go nuts, and I just couldn't force myself to do it. There just weren't enough games that seemed worth buying. Needless to say, I'll have to tell people not to get me Steam gift cards anymore. If they keep it up, I'll never be able to spend it all. It's going to take me a while to burn through all these Steam bucks, and it's not even a lot of money as far as video games are concerned. Some people spend $60 on a game without blinking.

However, I've grown too accustomed to my own "never pay more than $5 for a video game" rule. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have regretted using $35.99 of my precious gift-card money for the new Doom, which, despite being a supposedly great game, was discounted an impressive 40% (from $59.99) only six weeks after release. However, if it drops that fast, it's probably going to drop even more if I wait until the next sale, and I'm not really in a hurry to play a game in which the multiplayer mode is supposedly the worst part. In any case, even though I didn't take advantage of this particular deal, I wanted to mention Doom as an example of how this Steam sale was pretty okay. It wasn't all bad. However, Doom aside, it just didn't feel special.

Every year, there seems to be a general consensus that the biggest events on Valve's digital store — namely the big sales in winter (around Christmas) and in summer — aren't as "big" as they used to be. Every Steam sale in recent memory has been accompanied by exclamations of disappointment and claims that previous sales were better. I think it's party because these events have generated a bit too much hype over the years. When there's a certain amount of hype, it becomes impossible for reality to keep up. Moreover, with every passing Steam sale, there's another sale to which every future sale can be compared. We also have to be aware of the effects of nostalgia, and ask ourselves whether past Steam sales were actually better or whether we only think so because we have fond memories of enjoying them.

Stories of the good old days, clearly, should always be taken with a grain of salt. For the record, though, I do think there's some truth to them. "Steam sales used to be better" is a subjective statement, and assessing the "truth" of such a statement is difficult to do in any meaningful way, but there are some relevant objective facts which need examining, namely that Steam sales have undergone two major changes in the past few years.

I have no intention of limiting myself to total objectivity in everything that follows, but I think I can be objective enough to make a valid point. Personally, I'm not disappointed in this sale because I fell for the hype. I wasn't really hyped at all; my expectations, actually, were rather low. I'm not disappointed in this sale simply because of nostalgia, either. My disappointment with this particular sale is related to pricing; it can literally be quantified. What might be true is that I'm disappointed in this sale largely because I've already taken advantage of so many previous sales that, of all the games which could have been expected to see deep discounts this summer, I've already acquired most of the ones which interest me. If this is the case, however, it's unfortunate that so many of the remaining games which do interest me were discounted less in this sale than they have been in the past.

I had heard good things about Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, for example, and considered buying it last night. It was only $4.99, so it even fit within my "never spend more than $5 on a game" budget which shields me from any potential buyer's remorse when I don't have more than $70 in virtual money burning a hole in my Steam wallet. However, I always want to know I'm getting the best deal (or something close to it), even when the use of a gift card limits my options to a single store, so I looked up the game's price history on SteamDB. It turns out I would have been spending twice as much as the lowest price. The fact that such an old game was discounted a mere 50% should have been a clue; the 75% discounts are usually the ones which justify any Steam sale hype, and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic had several of them (putting the game at only $2.49) prior to this year.

There were several other games which I would have bought if their price histories hadn't shown better deals in the past (leaving open the possibility of repeats in the future). The best examples I can remember (coincidentally each with a base price of $9.99) were those which, like Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, had been demoted from 75% discounts to 50% discounts at some point over the past couple of years: Lisa was $4.99 in this sale, but had been $2.49 during the most recent winter sale; Far Cry 2 was also $4.99 in this sale and in the most recent winter sale, but had been $2.49 during last year's summer sale and in several prior sales; Papers, Please was $4.99 this time but had been sold for less on numerous occasions, going down to $2.49 at least once.

In only one case, I overlooked the effective "increase" in price: Once upon a time (although SteamDB's price history doesn't seem to go back far enough to show it), Max Payne 3 had been $3.99. For some reason, I chose not to buy it on that occasion, and the price has gone only as low as $4.99 in every sale since then. I really wanted the game and I had doubts about the price ever hitting $3.99 again, so I bought it anyway. It's not a big deal, really, but the other games mentioned here were low enough on my wishlist that I could stand to forgo the purchases on principle.

Looking up the price history of every game on Steam in order to draw a scientific and unbiased conclusion about the quality of any given sale is too much work for a blog post, so I'm going to stop that here. Still, the last two major Steam sales — i.e., the one which just ended and the most recent winter sale — were different from previous sales in a far more obvious way: static discounts.

It used to be that every major Steam sale followed a fairly predictable pattern. While a large number of games would be discounted for the duration, a few games would be featured daily with greater discounts lasting only a day or two. At some point, these daily deals were supplemented with flash sales posted every eight hours, so we had those for a while too. These limited-time deals made it worthwhile to check the Steam store on every day of such an event, or multiple times per day after the addition of flash sales. In fact, doing so was practically necessary if you wanted to make sure you were getting the best deal on anything. It was under these circumstances that I posted this guide, which is totally useless now that daily deals and flash sales are no more. In my opinion, it's unlikely that Steam sales will return to the way they were before.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for everyone. Although the sense of excitement is mostly gone for those who enjoyed checking the store every day for new deals, those with busy work schedules or unreliable internet access will find that the anxiety and frustration of missing these short-term discounts is gone as well. In many ways, the current model is better. Inexperienced shoppers (for whom I wrote the aforementioned guide) will no longer be tricked into buying a discounted game only to see the discount increase a few days later because they didn't know to wait for a daily deal. It's worth mentioning that Steam's refund policy could have helped to alleviate this problem as well, but I'm sure many appreciate the clarity anyway. Any deal you see on any given day of the sale is the best deal you'll get during that sale. Of course, as pointed out above, it might not be as good as the best deal Steam has ever offered.

And that's fine. It's normal for Steam discounts to fluctuate from year to year due to unseen forces beyond mortal comprehension. Nobody should expect every game to be at its absolute lowest price during every sale. Unfortunately, although I lack the hard data to back it up, I suspect that a game is now less likely to hit its rock-bottom price during a major Steam sale, thanks to the lack of short-term discounts.

A developer or publisher who was willing to sell a game at 75% off for 24 or 48 hours might be unwilling to sell that game at 75% off for a much longer period of time, like the 11 days of this most recent Steam sale. In choosing the discount for a promotion lasting more than a week, the developer or publisher might be willing to go only as far as 50% off. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic might be an example of this. The game hit $2.49 (75% off) for short periods of time on several occasions, but it hasn't gone below $4.99 (50% off) since Steam got rid of daily deals and flash sales.

The death of daily deals and flash sales is the second major change in Steam sales that occurred over the past few years. The first, explained in a previous post, was the death of giveaways and contests. The first three major Steam sales which I can remember were more than just sales: There were prizes to win, including lots of free games for a lucky few. In addition, badges were earned in part by unlocking special achievements in various games and by completing other simple community-related objectives. These things were meant to drive sales and build membership, of course, but people seemed to enjoy them.

After the 2011/2012 winter sale, the giveaways stopped, and so did the special in-game achievements. The next event did introduce flash sales (in which one of the games in each round was decided by a community vote), and still had community objectives as a way of earning badges. Starting with the 2013 summer sale, however, everything began to revolve around trading cards, which were henceforth required to earn each event's badge. During that sale, they were earned by casting votes for the community-chosen games in each day's flash sales. In this year's summer event (which lacked flash sales), you could earn these cards by clicking through your queue of recommended games each day. The one interesting sale in between was the 2015 summer sale, in which trading cards were earned by playing a so-called minigame, but it wasn't what I'd call fun. It was essentially a massively multiplayer Cookie Clicker, which didn't even work properly for much of the event due to Steam servers being predictably unprepared to handle the traffic load.

Anyone who thinks Steam trading cards are lame can still collect the free cards during each event and sell them on the market for Steam credit. It's hard to complain about free money. However, it's also hard to argue that the lack of free prizes makes recent Steam sales any more enjoyable for the community.

Although it might sound crazy, I do wonder if Valve is deliberately trying to kill the Steam sale hype. The giveaways were good for generating excitement, but Steam quickly became so well known for its sales that only the impatient or uninformed would ever buy a Steam game at full price. "Wait for the sale" became (and still is) the immediate response to anyone asking if a game on Steam is worth buying. Back when daily deals and flash sales were still a regular occurrence, the standard advice also included "wait for a daily deal or flash sale" (and perhaps buy the game on the last day of the sale if it never received either of these super discounts). Not only did Steam users learn not to buy games at full price; they also learned not to buy games at a discounted price until it was clear that the price wouldn't go any lower in the immediate future.

This is all perfectly rational, so it's not like Steam's customers did anything wrong. The situation might not have been great for business, though. Some developers have said they love Steam sales because it's when they get much of their revenue, but some might not appreciate the community's perception that the real price of a game is the "daily deal" price and that the game should be ignored at every other moment. The predictability of Steam sales is the problem; customers know they can get a game for 75% off if they wait, so those customers see no point in the game even being available at full price for the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, it wasn't an ideal situation for all consumers, either; I'm thinking mainly of the consumers who hadn't heard the advice about waiting for daily deals and flash sales. When a game is discounted for the duration of a several-day event only to be discounted even further for a shorter period of time within that event, the lesser discount can seem like a trick. If a game is going to be 75% off for a day, it's best to just leave it at that, instead of offering a 50% discount for several days prior. Recent Steam sales have obviously gone in the other direction, though, favoring long-term discounts. This allows for all kinds of bragging about the number of games on sale, even if this means some developers and publishers are less likely to push their prices as low as they would have done for daily deals and flash sales of years gone by.

As I mentioned above, I think it's unlikely that daily deals and flash sales will make a comeback, although it might happen if sales begin to suffer due to lack of interest and Valve decides they need to rebuild some of that hype. Likewise, I'm absolutely certain that giveaways and contests are long gone, never to return. However, even if it's true that the golden age of Steam sales is behind us, I can't really be too upset. It just means I was around for the best part of something which still, honestly, is pretty good.

I'm still disappointed, but I also know that I'm spoiled.

Steam's New Refund Policy

Originally posted June 3, 2015; updated June 7, 2015 and June 8, 2015.
A shorter version of this article was also published on Gather Your Party on June 3, 2015. Read it here.

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Original Post (June 3, 2015)

Just in time for the impending Steam summer sale — which is said to be starting next week — the Steam store has adopted a new policy regarding refunds and returns. In short, with a few very reasonable restrictions, you can get a refund on any game within two weeks of purchase as long as you've played the game for less than two hours.

Steam has, in the past, taken a lot of heat for its lack of a return policy. While many brick-and-mortar stores (at least in the United States) have incredibly lenient return policies (some not even requiring a receipt and thereby potentially opening the door to abuse), online stores selling digital content generally have a less-than-stellar track record when it comes to consumer rights. Actually, before now, Steam might have been one of the worst. Steam's customer support has a well-known reputation for being awful, and Steam developer Valve Corporation has had, for some time, an F rating with the Better Business Bureau. Pressure to implement a return policy has been especially strong from customers in the European Union (who have claimed, though perhaps erroneously, that they are legally entitled to refunds of Steam games according to EU laws).

The new refund policy is a huge step in the pro-consumer direction, and likely a much needed one after the paid mods debacle (which was so poorly received that the decision was quickly reversed). Personally, I don't think the idea of allowing mod developers to charge money for their work was such a fundamentally awful idea; free mods would surely continue to exist. Even if free mods had vanished completely as a result of Valve's meddling, it would have been more sensible to blame the modding community itself, rather than the company which merely provided what the mod developers were evidently so happy to use. In any case, Steam's reputation was damaged by that embarrassing fiasco. It's probably not wrong to speculate that the new refund policy is, in part, an attempt to repair some of that damage.

You can read the announcement and other details of the new policy on Steam's web site, but the key points (and their implications) are as follows:

• Refunds can be requested "for any reason" (including general dissatisfaction).
• You can get a refund within two weeks of purchase if your total playtime is less than two hours.
• Failing to meet those requirements? Valve says "you can ask for a refund anyway and we'll take a look." So try it, and you might get lucky.
• Pre-purchased products can be returned "any time prior to release" and up to fourteen days after release if your playtime is less than two hours.
• Refunds on in-game purchases are up to the developer.
• Some DLC might be non-refundable for various reasons (e.g., consumable DLC having already been consumed).
• Money is refunded using the original payment method, if possible. Otherwise, the money goes to your Steam Wallet by default.
• This means, in most cases, you can in fact get a "real" refund after paying with "real" money. Fears that customers will always be reimbursed in Steam credit, which must then be spent again on Steam, are largely unfounded and inspired by poor reading skills.
• It also means, if you do make a purchase using your Steam Wallet, you will be reimbursed in Steam credit. The return policy is not a trick to turn Steam Wallet funds back into regular money. If that were allowed, they would simply allow Steam Wallet withdrawals instead. You can, however, request a Steam Wallet refund, and get your money back out of the Steam Wallet if you placed it there yourself in the past fourteen days.
• Refunds are not allowed for anything purchased outside of the Steam store.
• If you're concocting a stupid plan to acquire inexpensive or free Steam keys from third-party sources like Humble Bundle and then return them to the Steam store for a refund of the full retail price in order to get free money, it's not going to work.
• Refund privileges will be revoked from individual users if the system is abused.
• If you're thinking you can get away with buying and returning a game repeatedly in order to play it for free indefinitely, you're wrong. Valve isn't that incredibly stupid, and they will shut you down.
• If you bought a game for full price right before the start of a sale, it's totally okay to return it for a full-price refund and then immediately buy the game at the discounted price.
• Obviously, this means the refunded amount for any purchase is the amount that was originally paid. If you think you can get free money by doing the opposite of the above — that is, buying a game on sale and then requesting a refund when the price goes back up — you're out of your mind. Steam has a record of what you paid.

This looks pretty great, especially in comparison to the old policy of refusing refunds outside of extraordinary circumstances. Some might wish that refunds were not limited to purchases in the past two weeks or games played less than two hours, but at least this is a step in the right direction. There are some additional restrictions, as well, but they're all rather predictable and understandable, so it's hard to imagine this policy causing a lot of grief to consumers as long as Steam upholds its end of the deal.

However, while the response from Steam users has been mostly positive despite the restrictions, some independent developers of very small games (and those sympathetic to their situation) want the policy to be more restrictive. Allowing two whole hours of playtime before a full refund, they claim, is too much. As one indie dev puts it:

you can get a refund for a game if you've got "less than two hours of playtime" on steam. well lol at me trying to sell small vignette games

— nina freeman (@hentaiphd) June 2, 2015

At least one games writer has also voiced her support of this viewpoint by suggesting a petition to change the policy:

i wonder if it's possible for us to organize as a group and make a petition... i wonder how many signatures would convince valve...

— Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander) June 2, 2015

While I can understand the concerns of those who develop very short games which might be completed in less than two hours and then returned, I also want to say "welcome to a real economy for the first time ever" and stress that refunds are a normal part of most business. The video game industry (or, at least, the biggest digital store on the PC end of it) is late to this party. Other industries have to deal with returns, and they do so without complaining. People wear clothes and then return them all the time. Of course, most people do buy clothes to keep them, which brings me to my next point: Not every customer is malicious.

Sure, customers can play through the bulk of an incredibly short indie game within the allowable refund time frame and then get a refund, but they can also engage in straight-up piracy with a negligible chance of getting in any real trouble at all. It doesn't mean they'll actually do either of these things. A satisfied customer probably isn't going to return a game that he or she enjoyed, even if doing so is legal. That's the action of a dissatisfied customer who doesn't want the developer to have any money. If indie developers (who seem to have so much faith in community-driven tools like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight) can't get people to keep their games without asking for a refund, they might have bigger problems than the exact playtime cut-off point in Steam's return policy.

Three things still do concern me about the return policy:

1. Steam only allows the actual players of a game to review it, and this is great because it prevents bogus reviews. However, the new refund policy makes it easier to abuse the review system. Someone who wants to write a bogus review can now do so without losing money. Just buy the game, play for a few minutes, review it and return it. I'm not sure what Steam can do about this, though. I certainly don't think people should be unable to review and return the same game. Whatever prompts a customer to request a refund might be exactly the kind of information which belongs in a review.
2. Some games don't use Steamworks and can be launched from the .exe file without using Steam. In these cases, one could copy the game files elsewhere and keep the game even after uninstalling the Steam copy and requesting a refund. Again, however, I'm not sure what Steam can do about this. It's an inherent risk of selling DRM-free software. Humble Bundle and GOG both sell DRM-free games, and both have return policies which could be abused.
3. Less importantly, as far as I know, there's nothing to keep someone from buying a Steam game, playing for a couple of hours to get its trading cards, selling those cards on the Steam market, and then returning the game for a refund. I'm not sure if Valve would even see this as a problem, considering that they make money from every Steam market transaction, but developers probably wouldn't like it. I'm guessing this is included in the types of abuse for which a person's refund privileges would supposedly be revoked according to the policy. (Update: It seems trading cards no longer drop within the first two hours of gameplay.)

Developers might worry about the first issue, but the potential for this kind of abuse only makes Steam's review system almost as unreliable as one which makes no effort to weed out non-customers, such as the user reviews on Metacritic. I'm not even convinced that Steam reviews were ever taken more seriously than Metacritic user reviews in the first place. Any developer worried about the second issue should already be using Steamworks or some other DRM, and the third issue is probably (update: now definitely) a non-issue. In any case, none of these things create a convincing argument for flushing consumer rights down the toilet.

Update (June 7, 2015):

Want more Twitter drama? Today is your lucky day. Yesterday, independent developer Qwiboo tweeted a graph showing a dramatic drop in sales of the game Beyond Gravity, occurring around the time that Steam introduced its new refund policy.

This looks pretty bad. Perhaps the refund policy is hurting independent developers more than I expected. Then again, this particular graph doesn't prove much. If you look up the game's Steam store price history on the third-party price-tracking site SteamPrices.com, you'll see that a special offer ended at approximately the same time:

The full price of the game is only $1.99, but this 50% discount knocked it down to only $0.99 (which is pretty significant). This information was omitted from Qwiboo's tweet, which also fails to show sales data from before the special offer began. So, wait a second, is this indie dev seriously misrepresenting the sales data to argue more convincingly that Steam's new refund policy is bad for developers? I mean, sure, we would expect sales figures to drop a bit when a refund system is put into place, but the graph originally tweeted by Qwiboo does nothing to prove that the decline in sales is the tragic result of a new return policy rather than the predictable result of a special offer coming to an end.

Bored and unable to sleep in the middle of the night, and not really bothered by the possibility of making enemies, I went and pointed this out on Twitter:

Indie dev @qwiboo blames #SteamRefunds for sharp drop in sales, forgets to mention special offer ending at same time. pic.twitter.com/eOKY7t2DlK

— Out of Lives (@outoflives) June 7, 2015

What I had stupidly failed to realize was that, hours earlier, Qwiboo had actually posted additional data which is much more informative, as it shows the recent sales decline in comparison to other times when a discount went away:

Their sales always rise and fall as discounts come and go, as expected, but this game's sales do seem to go lower than ever at the very end of the graph (which is when the refund policy was introduced). When I saw this newer graph, I posted a correction to my Twitter feed:

Much better data from @qwiboo, which I had initially overlooked, shows the real effect of #SteamRefunds more clearly. pic.twitter.com/0A6jOvLxKV

— Out of Lives (@outoflives) June 7, 2015

Unfortunately, I doubt Qwiboo ever noticed it; almost immediately after my first tweet, this happened:

Oops! Sadly for Qwiboo, the act of blocking my account didn't really do anything except hide my tweets from Qwiboo and prevent me from seeing their page while signed in. It prevented no one else from seeing my criticism, and in fact only made it slightly harder for me to find out about that second graph which led me to post a correction. I'd feel worse about the whole situation if not for Qwiboo's reaction.

Anyway, I guess the takeaway here is that some independent developers might have been right to fear the new refund policy on Steam. At least some of them, Qwiboo included, really are losing sales.

I still do, however, stand by what I wrote before. The new policy is a strongly pro-consumer move. Steam might need to work hard to prevent abuse of the refund system, and they might even need to add more restrictions regarding what can and cannot be returned in order to make this work for everyone, but I won't be convinced that allowing refunds is a fundamentally bad thing just because developers had gotten used to an economically abnormal situation which was truly bad for paying customers.

While it was unfair of me to imply bad things about Qwiboo before doing enough research to see their updated sales graph, I'm still not sure if anyone should feel bad about their current sales predicament. Here's why: I haven't played Beyond Gravity. I don't know what it's like. How long is the game? How fun is the game? Is it well made? Does it suck? Sure, maybe the game is so short that people really are able to abuse the system by playing every bit of the game within the allotted two hours and then requesting a refund. On the other hand, maybe the game is being returned simply because it's bad, and maybe those previously higher sales figures represent a lot of dissatisfied customers who would have returned the game if they could have done so. I can't rule out that possibility. I just don't know.

Furthermore, I'm sure a lot of people are currently using the refund system as a risk-free way of trying a game, but I still don't know that this is a bad thing. There should be a risk-free way of trying a product before putting down the money. More specifically, I believe every game should have a playable demo, and certain people in the industry disagree but their reasons for disagreeing are thoroughly anti-consumer. They are afraid that players will no longer want to buy their games after playing demos; in other words, they want to prevent customers from having the ability to avoid products with which they would ultimately be dissatisfied.

If people are trying and returning full games as a substitute for playable demos which don't exist, the developers or publishers are to blame for not supplying playable demos. If people aren't keeping the games after trying them, it's only because they're able to make more educated decisions about their purchases, and wishing to deny your customers this opportunity is the same as hoping that your customers get tricked into buying things they don't like. That's pretty terrible.

A person who likes a game is still going to keep it. A person who returns a game for a full refund obviously didn't like the game and is dodging a bullet. A developer who complains about refunds, and who has no evidence that the system is truly being abused, perhaps needs to focus on making a better game instead of complaining.

My advice to developers is this: Make good games that won't be leaving customers with a desire to get their money back, and (although I hate to say it) make sure you implement some kind of DRM if you're uncomfortable with the risk of not doing so.

Update (June 8, 2015):

I'm a little disappointed that people keep on retweeting and quoting my first tweet about Qwiboo (in which I hastily made a judgement based on limited information) while my second tweet about Qwiboo (in which I corrected my erroneous implications) is being ignored. But I guess that's just how Twitter works sometimes.

Anyway, I'd like to mention another independent developer now. They've gotten quite a bit of attention after reporting a dramatic loss in sales following the introduction of Steam's new refund policy:

They had more to say as well:

Entertaining conclusions :) But difficult to tease apart from the Steam Summer Sale dates leaking as well.

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

For what it's worth the previous 3 months data has been pretty constant, right up until 2 days ago.

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

I wish we were provided with more insights as to what causes our sales (and seemingly, our sales alone) to flatline overnight

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

Worse is that every single one of Steam's competitors (including direc sales) have been so comprehensively crushed there's not much fallback

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

Puppy Games is the developer of stylish faux-retro/arcade-style games Revenge of the Titans, Droid Assault, Titan Attacks!, Ultratron, and the upcoming Basingstoke. I've played the first four of these games, which I bought back when Puppy Games was featured on Humble Bundle, and I actually like this developer's work. I really enjoyed Titan Attacks! and Ultratron, the latter of which I've played for a few dozen hours in total. Because of this, I'd be a little surprised if Puppy Games' recent drop in sales were truly the result of returns by legitimately unhappy customers. Then again, I realize that this developer's games are not everyone's cup of tea.

In any case, despite how I feel about their products, I'm finding it really hard to feel bad for Puppy Games no matter how low their sales go. Long before the new Steam refund policy was announced — in August of last year, to be exact — Puppy Games posted a truly idiotic and somewhat self-contradictory anti-consumer rant on their blog, followed by an only slightly believable and still obnoxious "just kidding, it was all just a ruse for attention" post two weeks later. Regardless of how serious they were when they called their customers worthless, and regardless of what hidden intentions prompted them to write such intentionally inflammatory garbage, the whole ordeal pretty much cancels out any sympathy I might feel for them now.

To make matters worse, in regards to refunds, they tweeted this yesterday:

Again just for the record: the next idiot to say "why don't you make games people don't want to refund then" can shove their opinion up thei

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 7, 2015

what a shame, ran out of characters

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 7, 2015

Personally, I like their games, as I mentioned already. However, this doesn't mean I agree with the way they've rudely dismissed the very sensible notion that perhaps developers who don't want to see their games returned should try harder to make games which people want to keep. At least they were being more sensible earlier today:

Further clarification: we absolutely agree with having a refund policy. We had one all along until Valve came along

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 8, 2015

What we have a problem with is its implementation

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 8, 2015

So, regarding implementation: Even if the refund policy recently introduced on Steam could use some fine-tuning, any revenue lost due to legitimate refunds is not something for which anyone should apologize. Happy customers typically don't request refunds at all, and unhappy customers deserve to get their money back, so refunds are justified almost always. The system can be abused, but I doubt this is the case for Puppy Games. It almost certainly isn't a case of players returning the games after finishing them, because (with the possible exception of Titan Attacks!) the games have more content than one is likely to see in only two hours. Maybe people are buying games to try them, and maybe Steam will eventually come out and say that this counts as abuse of the refund policy, but I still think it's fair when no playable demo of a game is made available.

I doubt I'll be updating this post again unless Steam's policy changes, so to close it out, I'll post some more tweets. First, here's some evidence that the refund policy isn't so bad for every independent developer:

@puppygames @Steam_Spy That. pic.twitter.com/MOYsTZlF8g

— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) June 7, 2015

our sales are going up since the steam refund system. It might be a really good thing after all! #gamedev #indiegamedev

— Elias Viglione (@eliaspixel) June 7, 2015

Not sure if this is the final graph or if refunds are taken out of this but thats what we got #steamrefunds pic.twitter.com/x0Qlktl8z5

— Elias Viglione (@eliaspixel) June 8, 2015

I dont see #steamrefunds really making any difference in our sales atleast. Guess #HeroSiege is a good game after all.

— Elias Viglione (@eliaspixel) June 8, 2015

Finally, some wise words from the HuniePop Twitter account:

How any indie dev is under the illusion that being anti-gamer is going to work out for them I'll never understand.

— HuniePop (@HuniePop) June 8, 2015

Funny how you have yet to see any pro-gamer dev that has been negatively impacted by the refund policy. HMMMMM.

— HuniePop (@HuniePop) June 8, 2015