this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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@Kedly What? This is flat out untrue. Back in 2008 Stardock's attempt at a storefront via Impulse offered refunds: https://web.archive.org/web/20080708091849/http://tgnforums.stardock.com/315290
Later in 2013, EA of all companies would also offer refunds on their storefront, Origin: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/08/ea-begins-offering-refunds-for-its-digital-game-sales-on-origin/
And later that same year, GOG would offer refunds: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/gog-s-new-money-back-guarantee-is-more-about-trust-than-refunds
It was only a couple years after EA & GOG, in 2015, that Valve began offering refunds on Steam: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/valve-begins-offering-refunds-for-all-steam-games/
Impulse offered refunds for technical issues, and I could easily find examples of Steam doing the same in 2008 for GTAIV, EA only sold its own games, which made the legal hurdles it needed to jump through and the amount of developers it needed to get an ok from significantly lower, and GoG is GoG, an actually decent competitor to Steam, so sure I'll give you that GoG beat Steam to the punch there
Your initial claim remains false.
As indicated, digital game storefronts offered refunds explicitly prior to Steam, and it wasn't leading the way, especially given its policy was that all purchases were not refundable, up till 2015's changes.
Leading the way isn't making some exceptions to their policies occasionally, it's making refunds a part of the policies from the outset when others aren't.
Fine. My initial statement was incorrect. I still think Valve put a lot of leg work into getting fairly easy refunds in place for a digital storefront that thousands of different developers sell their games on, and that that is an insanely bigger beast than the other examples outside of GoG's example, which I havent fully looked into, but my initial statement was more specific than that and thus wrong