How Steam’s new refund policy will revive Greenlight and make independent game development better

I have been using Steam since before you could buy games on it. Over the years I have seen the platform evolve from strength-to-strength, bringing millions of users in with it’s ever expanding catalog of games.

In recent years, the ‘Greenlighting’ process was introduced — allowing independent developers to submit their games to Steam’s catalog if they were able to harbor enough upvotes from the Steam community.

Like many, I was fascinated by this new feature and the wealth of possibilities it would bring. I eagerly bought into several titles as soon as they became available. And like many, I was burned.

The first bitterly disappointing title I bought was advertised as an novel take on city building, with the goal of keeping roaming non-player RPG adventurers happy. Like a sort of ‘World of Warcraft tycoon’ where you’re running Goldshire.

The result was Towns.

This infamous Steam release was the first straight-up failure of Greenlight, the game was fully abandoned months after development began — despite the game not being up to scratch, leaving hundreds of thousands of purchasers disappointed and out of pocket (200,000 people bought towns and the game grossed over $2million.)

For some reason, Towns is still available to buy on Steam, please don’t accidentally buy it.

‘Ah well’ I thought. Not all games are cut from the same stone. And so I continued to buy Greenlit titles that looked promising. Some were good, some were less-than-good.

The next disappointing title I bought was ‘Castle Story’ — A Kickstarter success, raising over $700,000 for the two-man development team.

“Its promised blend of building and strategy looks great, the kind of thing to rekindle the very fondest of childhood memories…”

Oh, how excellent, I exclaimed, as I rushed through the Paypal checkout and forked out the $20. It had been in development for several months now and should have most of the core functionality in place, especially with the high budget.

Approximately 70 minutes later, my face downturned, I closed the game, the palpable feeling of disappointment was there again.

The game was awful. I knew it was awful in the first 5 minutes and I gave it an additional hour and-a-bit to see if there was any good to be salvaged, there wasn’t. It wasn’t fun.

I was done. $10 an hour for disappointment was too steep a price to pay. Too risky.

Two of the games I’d helped bring to life because I thought they might be nice to play one day had disappointed me and I was done with risking it on could-be-games, from now on I’d only early-access titles long after their inception, after many ‘Lets play’ videos to negate my suspicions.

A quick look over the Steam ‘Early Access’ section now reveals many such titles with overwhelmingly negative reviews. Reasons vary from lazy, bored or incompetent developers, poor execution and not delivering as promised — never ‘bad idea’. If the idea was bad it wouldn’t have got greenlit.

And what allows these developers to simply abandon development on their projects, or work at such a snail’s pace that a week’s worth of development work somehow becomes months?

There’s no risk of their money being taken away if they simply don’t bother.

There’s no skin in the game, there’s no risk involved. Get a good idea greenlit with some snazzy promotional material, a hype-filled description and some basic fiddling in Unity and you’re set to receive some money you didn’t have before — enabling you to go travelling or have the time to play all the games you didn’t have the time to play.

Nobody’s going to take the money away from you. $10k in the bank. $20k in the bank. $50k in the bank.

If you never launch Unity again, that money is yours. So what if your Kickstarter promised a fun and compelling experience, so what if your Steam description quotes Kotaku’s expectations for some far-distant time?

That’s for the suckers who bought your terrible game to worry about. Jokes on them.

Except they aren’t. I imagine that everyone who helps Greenlight titles and purchases them gets burned sooner or later. How many times are people fully turned off Early access games with their first regretful purchase?

How many people give a few titles a chance before deciding it’s simply not worth it to risk hopefully betting on? I know it’s more than one.

Steam Refunds gives the consumer a recourse. An escape-rope. You buy a title and try it and it turns out to be terrible? It’s okay. Get your money back and fund something worth playing.

In three months, worthwhile developers will still be releasing good products that people will still be paying for, terrible products will stand and die, and their creators will have to learn to make better products in future.

It’s introducing a system resembling natural selection to a currently unregulated one, where game devs have defaulted on their commitments on more than one occasion, and potentially bringing back anyone who has been disappointed and left when they realised they couldn’t get their money back and were left holding an inferior product.

Now you can’t just throw up something that has been minimally developed because people will pick up on it straight away and question it.

Previously there was no failure to the process. No fragility. Inferior games got left to be non-developed because the devs can’t be bothered anymore and run with the money.

Now all Steam needs to do is clean up the likes of ‘Towns’. Although, if you do accidentally buy it, you’ll be alright.