People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It’s kinda where this whole “review bombing” thing comes from. It seems like Valve’s policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as “off-topic activity” and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They’re still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.
For trying a game, trying it, disliking it and refunding it, a series of events that is completely normal and allowed by steam’s refund policy? Well it’s probably getting changed when gaben dies and someone else takes over, but I’m not sure we should be rooting for that…
There’s a transactional cost to processing the sale, hosting the giant download and then issuing the refund. If people organized and manipulated the system and this became a financial burden, then the policy would almost certainly change.
This is actually a fantastic idea. How long will it take Valve to threaten account bans for doing it?
People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It’s kinda where this whole “review bombing” thing comes from. It seems like Valve’s policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as “off-topic activity” and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They’re still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.
For trying a game, trying it, disliking it and refunding it, a series of events that is completely normal and allowed by steam’s refund policy? Well it’s probably getting changed when gaben dies and someone else takes over, but I’m not sure we should be rooting for that…
There’s a transactional cost to processing the sale, hosting the giant download and then issuing the refund. If people organized and manipulated the system and this became a financial burden, then the policy would almost certainly change.