I have major regret for buying this game. Games like this should have a 20 hour refund window instead of 2. It took me 2 hours to realize it wasn't possible to get the game to not run like garbage.
Well if the companies refuse to give you a demo to try, maybe you should pirate it to try and then purchase it.
Another option is becoming a patient gamer and just waiting for the game to get better (if it does) a year or two down the line and then buy it at a discount.
In the last few years there aren't many games I didnt regret buying early.
I'd rather buy it than spend hours and hours downloading and failing to unpack it for unknown reasons.
But I'm not going to spend more than like 10 minutes trying to make it work. If it takes longer than that, it's just a shit game that doesn't deserve my money. Too many other perfectly good games to spend my time playing to fuck around with all of that.
I've heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.
In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn't and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window...
If there's any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that'd be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.
I know when you're fighting with Google support as an app store developer, including images in correspondence can get a human to look at it as they can't properly scan that for automation purposes.
Maybe a url in a claim would be the same for steam? Not sure if you can include images.
7 hours of cities skylines before I have up on trying to get a subway to align in what's supposed to be a relaxing game. My fault that most of that time was afk, I suppose. Steam refused to refund.
I once got a refund after 5 hours. I opened the game, left it running at the main menu, then went to make lunch and completely forgot about it. Wasted probably about 3.5 hours in the menu. When I asked for a refund, I didn't even explain that I'd left it open in the main menu; I just pointed out why I didn't like it and why I wanted a refund. The game in question was Mount and Blade, store country was Germany, and I submitted the refund request on the same day I bought it.
The more recent installment, Bannerlord, had caught my attention, but a lot of people were saying it was unfinished and that devs weren't updating the game to deliver things that were promised and instead were making minor hotfixes that even broke the mods attempting to address the game's inadequacies. A lot of the complaints compared it to the first installment in the series and were recommending trying it out, especially since it had had a thriving mod scene and was more fleshed-out over all. I tried it out, but it just felt too dated for my taste; couldn't get into it.
Maybe I would've gotten into it had I given it more time. I just felt pressured to quickly make a decision on whether to refund it after I had wasted more than 3 hours of my "trial" sitting in the main menu.
Perhaps Steam's policy should be 2 hours or 10% of expected playtime as set by the devs, whichever is greater, perhaps with a max of 10 hours. That seems pretty reasonable to me.