Today we have updated a portion of our Refund Policy regarding pre-purchased titles. This change covers titles that are in pre-purchase and offer “Advanced Access”. Playtime acquired during the Advanced Access period will now count towards the Steam refund period. You can find our more information regarding Steam Refunds here.
This is not about early access, where you buy an unfinished game that may never be completed. Advanced Access is the fairly uncommon offering where buying some sort of special edition gives you access to the full, complete game a few days before official release.
Advanced Access is time spent with the finished, release-state game. There was no reason for this to have not been counted before.
It’s as finished as the game is going to be at launch, this isn’t “Early Access” where the game is still evolving. You can talk all you want about how games are released unfinished these days, that’s fine, but make no mistake. “Advanced Access” is the game as it will be on release day, with access granted a few days sooner. It is NOT still in active development as an unfinished product and is not going to see significant changes between the start of the Advanced Access period and public release.
Advanced access is playing the game in it’s Launch Day state, and any rules for time played should be consistent between Advanced Access and official launch. Your first two hours in Advanced Access will be the same as the first two hours if you only started on launch day. It’s the same game with the same refund rules, not your opportunity to red-eye your way through the whole game for a few days and still get an uncontested refund.
Sounds more like just closing a loophole.
This is not about early access, where you buy an unfinished game that may never be completed. Advanced Access is the fairly uncommon offering where buying some sort of special edition gives you access to the full, complete game a few days before official release.
Advanced Access is time spent with the finished, release-state game. There was no reason for this to have not been counted before.
Problem is that it’s usually not a finished game. The old way at least gave stupid players a way to punish bad publishers.
This is a bad move for the customers.
It’s as finished as the game is going to be at launch, this isn’t “Early Access” where the game is still evolving. You can talk all you want about how games are released unfinished these days, that’s fine, but make no mistake. “Advanced Access” is the game as it will be on release day, with access granted a few days sooner. It is NOT still in active development as an unfinished product and is not going to see significant changes between the start of the Advanced Access period and public release.
Advanced access is playing the game in it’s Launch Day state, and any rules for time played should be consistent between Advanced Access and official launch. Your first two hours in Advanced Access will be the same as the first two hours if you only started on launch day. It’s the same game with the same refund rules, not your opportunity to red-eye your way through the whole game for a few days and still get an uncontested refund.
The “bad move” is a customer pre-ordering in the first place. We, as consumers, should know what’s up by now.