2weeks of being jerked around by steam, doing every. Single. One. Of their suggestion AND logging that I did them. No result. The end result could be boiled down to "sucks for you. We don't give refund."

In the end, I ate the $60. I wasn't going to risk my entire game library over one game.

I must say though, the events certainly "raised my consciousness" to the fact that owning digital things is in a really crappy place right now. What other company do we allow the right to reach into our house and pull back things that we have rightfully purchased? It's really quite absurd.

Anyway, at some point this is going to get regulated, especially in the EU. They won't be allowed to use terms like 'purchase' and 'buy' without a specific legal consequence (like the right of resale). Until then we can only hope they get onerous enough to get on the radar of lawmakers.

I really like this idea. Make sure that words that if you want to claim to 'sell' something, you actually have to fulfill criteria that guarantee buyers' rights. It makes a lot of sense and would eliminate a lot of bullshit in digital distribution.

Amazon with Kindle books.

Jokes aside, I had no idea that OReilly gave PDFs with their books. I thought that was only something that much smaller publishers did.

Console games we'll take back if our disk tester says they're faulty.

If I meet the minimum requirements, if I can show bench marks, "prove" system stability, and run every other game in my library with the exception of this specific game, who is liable? Is it my fault that their game doesn't run on my system? That's an honest question, cause I don't know. I know that as a developer, if something I've written doesn't run on a computer that I consider it a fault in my software. Or, can at least recognize that an external force (i.e. a Bit Locker or something) will prevent that software from ever running due to permission issues, at which point a refund would be in order. I just can't wrap my head around not being viable for a broken product.

Valve are. As a matter of law, any seller is responsible for selling a working product. If Valve claim otherwise, they're lying, and probably breaking the law in doing so.

I guess the fine line from Valve is, there isn't really any way to differentiate people legitimately having problems vs. people trying to scam the system, so their default policy is if you file a chargeback your account is going to be suspended.

Or they could just limit the number of refunds you can get, to say 1 out of 10 games that you buy, and no more than one per month.

Or they could just refund you any time you want. Yeah, sure, a few people will scam them that way, but it's not like they have a huge per-unit cost for delivering the games to you. If it'll make users like the above more happy and more willing to buy from Steam, it's probably worth it in the long run.

I think your underestimating the number of gamers who would pull all-nighters to play through a game as fast as possible in order to play games for free. Heck, plenty of people already do that without the ability to get a refund once they are finished.

Hell, if I was still in college I would seriously consider doing it as a broke student.

Allowing for refunds within 24 hours is effectively a free 24 game rental for any game in the library.