Closing the early access loophole.
This isn’t about early access. This is explicitly about Advanced Access, where a special edition grants access to the complete game a few days early.
This is a closed loophole, not an injustice.
I think this is fine so long as valve continues to allow exceptions in cases of obvious bait and switches, etc as they have historically.
Yeah, and hopefully in general for cases where an update significantly changes functionality, like DRM requiring always-on our breaking stuff like Steam Deck compatibility for those users
Yeah idk how I feel about that. Its kind-of on the developer for offering early access. Its not like they aren’t getting data from people playing early access.
Maybe early access just shouldn’t be a thing or needs to be free. Or they could just pay people to test their games?
2 hours isn’t shit. Especially not if something is in early access and isn’t even close to a finished product.
In spite of some of the comments to the contrary here, I really think this is fine. Early access is early access. 2 hours has been the ground truth for a while. It does seem like a loophole, and I’m fine with them filling it.
Edit: and it isn’t really about Early Access – it’s about Advanced Access, from pre-orders.
Nah, I get the urge to jump to the defense at this point but I imagine the majority of people doing this weren’t malicious and the actual devs have already been paid and aren’t losing money on this. It lies squarely at the feet of the capitalist production companies in my opinion and fuck them.
Wild, I didn’t realise this was possible for early access games.
Not early access games but more AAA “Early access games”, which means you preorder advanced edition you get to play like a week early. The biggest examples being Starfield and that new Star wars game by ubisoft (with the insane price of 130 for its super special edition). So this is just a logical loophole getting closed. We can have disagreements with the 2 hour refund window on steam but I don’t think it was ever intentional for you to play 48 hours of a game then being able to refund the thing since its not official out.
Aha the “Unlock Game Early Edition” trend, which is awful in itself. Makes it a slightly more niche loophole.
I quite like the spirit of the 2 hour no quibble refund policy. It does still have many problems, but being able to play for 48 hours and then refund no-questions-asked was for sure never intentional.
Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit.
fair enough
I assumed this was always the case
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I accidentally used this loophole with Starfield.
Wrote a whole thing pleading my case thinking there might be a slim chance of it getting approved since I was considerably over the 2 hour limit. But it ended up just getting auto approved within an hour or two.
I was initially shocked, but quickly realized what happened.