Developer finds himself up the creek with plenty of paddles.
I’ve been covering Steam’s two hour, fourteen day refund policy for the last eleven years since Valve first implemented it. Holy crap, it’s been eleven years? Someone get grandma her osteoporosis medicine. And it’s fair to say that the refund policy has been the bane of bad actors on Steam, as users now have unfettered access to getting their money back should they feel the game just wasn’t worth the asking price, was misleading advertised, poor quality, or just outright a scam.
And I’m trying to figure out where Paddle Paddle Paddle lands on that spectrum.
Paddle Paddle Paddle is making the free publicity clickbait rounds on sites like Gamesradar thanks to its solo developer Mateo claiming on the bird site that his game has a 21% refund rate amounting to 55,000 refunds.
It’s worth noting that the average for Steam refunds seems to be roughly 10% from our limited data so 21% isn’t impossible but it does start to raise a lot of questions. So does the 55,000 refund number itself. For the record Mateo has so far provided absolutely no evidence of either number.
What we do know about Paddle Paddle Paddle should call both figures into question. For starters we know that the game peaked at 401 players 10 months ago, and it just very recently hit 5,000 followers. So you’re telling me that over twelve thousand percent of the game’s peak player count refunded it? And over 261,000 people purchased a cooperative game that only a maximum of .51% were playing at peak hours?
It’s pretty obvious what slant the developer is going for with their tweet, by noting that the game has a 21% refund rate “even though the reviews are 90% positive” and including a single review about how the game is great, but the user refunded it anyway because they beat it within the refund time. We’re supposed to envision evil, greedy gamers who thoroughly enjoyed the game and then refunded it anyway because they’re evil and greedy.
The reviews don’t back that up either, as a scroll through the game’s positive reviews only pulls back a very small handful of reviews that also carry the “refunded” label. I did find a lot more reviews where the user says they’re considering refunding, but after months (many were posted last September/October) they haven’t yet gone through with it.
It’s worth noting that the problem here is not the game’s length. Sure, you can complete a 90 minute game and refund it on Steam with no problem, but how many are actually doing that? Very few. Steam has a massive economy of very short games, many of the titles I cover on my YouTube channel can be beaten in roughly an hour. If the issue came down to Steam users abusing refunds for short games, there are hundreds of notable developers producing short games and it wouldn’t be an issue that comes up roughly once every two years.
The average person is lazy, especially when it comes to low cost things. Sure getting a refund on Steam takes very little effort, but it doesn’t require no effort. Are there people who will play a game, absolutely love it, and refund it anyway because it was short? Absolutely, that number is more than zero. But it’s not the epidemic level that shady devs occasionally pop up to claim.
You only get a 21% refund rate if the userbase is particularly motivated to get those refunds and “I liked the game but it’s still in the refund range” doesn’t cut it which means people are refunding the game because they didn’t like it.
Maybe it’s because Paddle Paddle Paddle advertises itself as being “stupidly long” yet the game is shorter than your average Marvel movie. Perhaps Mateo’s advert that rage-quitting is “a feature, not a bug” was a self-fulfilling prophecy, deliberately creating a game with the purpose of pissing off players into no longer playing, and then being shocked that people leave the game upset. And maybe it’s because the game looks and seems to play like sloppy, rushed shovelware looking at Steam reviews.
As usual the negative reviews tell a much more detailed story with problems surrounding bugs, particularly the game being unplayable in coop due to descync issues that (according to reviews) Mateo has been completely silent on and hadn’t fixed. Other users note that the game just isn’t good quality, in addition to being short. Some are pissed that the developer released a very short game and then put out more content as paid DLC.
Paddle Paddle Paddle may have an 88% review score, but the negative reviews paint a good picture on why so many people are refunding it. Assuming Mateo isn’t lying about those figures, by the way.
I’ve seen a ton of suggestions on how to “fix” Steam’s refund policy and compared to the current policy they all suck and don’t so much fix the policy as they do strip consumer rights and open up avenues for shady, abusive developers to sell slop and prevent customers from getting their money back. All for a problem that only seems to come up once every other year and mostly by shovelware developers angry that people are allowed to get their money back.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 