A Short Game, 55,000 Refunds, and a Fight Over Steam's Rules

Solo developer Mateo Covic, who works as Zoroarts, says he has refunded more than 55,000 sales of Paddle Paddle Paddle and blames Steam's two-hour refund window. Steam grants no-questions-asked refunds to anyone who owns a game for less than two weeks and has played under two hours. Covic argues that a game beatable inside that window is exposed by the rule, and that players who finished his game and left positive reviews still took their money back.

Covic laid out the complaint after posting his frustration on X and then speaking to GamesRadar+. Reviews for Paddle Paddle Paddle ran about 90 percent very positive, he said, yet the refund rate hit 21 percent. He built the game around roughly four hours of total play, with the full level running about 3.5 hours and the free demo level taking around 40 minutes.

"This should not be possible Steam," he wrote on X/Twitter.

"Would be cool if you could finally do something about your refund policy. Got dozens of reviews like that and 21% refund rate even though the reviews are 90% very positive."

— Mateo Covic

He noted that plenty of players logged 5, and even 20-plus, hours, but speedrunners and skilled players cleared it in one to two, and some told him to make a longer game. Covic said the policy exists to protect buyers misled by a store page or blocked by technical faults, not to hand out free playthroughs.

The developer told GamesRadar+, in comments spotted by GamesRadar+, that the current rule "just makes it super easy for players to abuse this rule." He drew a line between refunds with a genuine reason and refunds taken purely because the option is there. His post, he said, targeted the second group: people who enjoyed the game, reviewed it well, and refunded it anyway.

The response turned on him. Covic said the hateful DMs and insulting comments reached a level he had not seen before, and Paddle Paddle Paddle was review bombed, sliding from very positive recent reviews to mixed. He also said he could see refund reasons like difficulty but had no way to tell which were honest, since a player can select any listed reason and lie.

"My tweet was targeted towards the people who enjoyed the game, wrote a positive review, and refunded the game just because they can. Many people think that I'm a complete asshole now and want to remove the refund policy in general but that was never my intention."

— Mateo Covic

Not every refund cited length. In one Steam review, a player said they were refunding not because they finished it under two hours but because they considered it low-effort ragebait, with janky movement and a look that would fit a free Newgrounds upload from 2010. The same reviewer argued Covic had wrongly assumed most of the 55,000 refunds came from finish-and-refund players rather than disappointment with the game.

Marketing consultant Indie Game Joe pushed back on the framing while granting Covic's frustration. He said the same policy Covic wants changed helped Paddle Paddle Paddle reach 270,000 sales, because it lets strangers gamble a few dollars on an unknown game knowing they can back out. In a thread on X, he argued that weakening the safety net would favor big publishers with trusted names, since buying without a refund becomes an act of trust, and trust flows to names people already know.

Joe said he has lived the same math. His game Don't Scream is short, sold more than 100,000 copies in under a week, and he went in expecting high refunds as the cost of a short experience. He also said he has yet to hear a fix that beats the problem, because Steam cannot judge how justified any single refund is, so any change aimed at bad actors would hurt the majority refunding for real reasons. Valve can already cut off refund access for anyone repeating the trick.

Joe backed one idea from Covic himself: showing expected playtime on store pages. He said it would not stop determined finish-and-refunders but would set expectations before purchase and kill the "I didn't know it was short" excuse. Covic later called it a take that changed his mindset.

I think Joe has the stronger case, because a policy that occasionally feeds a freeloader is the same one that lets buyers risk money on a solo dev's rage platformer at all. The 270,000 sales and the 55,000 refunds come from the same rule, and only one of those numbers exists without it.

Covic said he treated the episode as a lesson. He wrote that he would think twice before posting that kind of statement again. I know the sting he describes is real, but the trade he is protesting is the one that put his game in front of that many buyers in the first place.

Read also, Valve's Steam posted its highest-ever revenue in the first half of 2026, an estimated $11.1bn by market tracker Alinea Analytics, beating both the end of 2025 and the first half of that year. Alinea's Rhys Elliott tied the growth to a large Chinese user base, higher prices on new releases, and third-party publishers returning to Steam after dropping their own launchers.