I feel like there should be an avenue to report unfinished, buggy, bad product games beyond a negative review. I'm not saying refund everyone who bought it, I know that companies make money, but something better than a negative review alone. There is undoubtedly a massive increase of half-baked games and DLCs and I'm not the only one noticing it.

Like a demerit that if large enough, can affect the company's ability to sell copies, like a section of the check out screen next to the purchase button that says something along the lines of "# of players have reported that this game is unfinished or unplayable in its current state". I don't think it'd ever happen because it'd decrease sales, but this s*** pisses me off.

Again, they don't have to actually issue refunds to everyone that requests them, but SOMETHING has to be better than this.

Even something like “we can’t make exceptions bc of our licensing agreement, but here’s how you can leave feedback” would feel more honest than Steam's dead end reply with a link to the policy page.

The refund system as it stands basically shields this kind of decline by shifting the cost of unfinished content onto customers who stuck around and trusted the platform.

I do hope this feedback makes its way to be read by human eyeballs.. It feels like Steam is risking long term trust and loyalty over short term rigidity and labor minimization, and that’s disappointing to see after a decade of use.

*** Context:
I recently wanted a refund that got auto denied because I played 9ish hours, totally get it, understandable, not a big deal - however:

it was a DLC and it's counting the time that I played the game not using the busted a** DLC. most of that was actually in the content editor working on some custom main-game features, not actually playtime using this DLC. When I did try the DLC, as the game level increased it overheated my system, crashed the game, and messed up the file I’d been building.

The refund denial process sucks. The response felt prewritten, with no way to add context once the ticket was automatically closed on me. No nuance to the situation at all, and the follow up I sent got more of the same and even included this "If it appears to us that you are abusing our refund policy or violating our terms of service, we may decline requests for refunds".. DUH, that's not the issue I have.

If a game or DLC doesn’t work as intended and the issue isn’t obvious in the first couple hours, customers are just stuck with slop. That’s becoming the norm as more and more titles are released unfinished. Even the notoriously buggy 10 year old DLCs function better than the 2 year old second iteration of this particular base game.

And someone at the office has to know about how sloppy the new iteration is… it’s the top title in its genre and it’s doing a slow public death rattle and hoping no one notices.

The fact that the preordered DLCs still aren’t released two years in, when the original game had several out by this point says a lot.

I’ve preferred Steam because it feels more secure, I don’t feel like skeezy boardsmen are about to sell my card numbers when I buy something, but this wasn’t great either and I’ll look for other sources for the games I’d been eyeing lately.

It’s very disappointing as there were quite a few other DLCs and titles I’d been anticipating. Thankfully they don’t seem to be Valve exclusive, but anyway thank you for your time if anyone is reading this.