How to Refund Games on Steam

Gaming is fun. However, there are times where the games you’ve just purchased aren’t exactly fun at all due to the handful of bugs, technical issues, or you just didn’t like what you’re playing. Whatever the reason is, if it falls within Steam’s rules when it comes to refunding a game, you shouldn’t have to worry about your reason. Here’s a guide that will tell you how to refund your games on Steam.

Why Refund a Game on Steam

It happens. The game you bought is bad, there are technical issues that prevent you from playing the game, you wanted to purchase a different edition of the game, or it was a mistake. Whatever your reason is, Steam lets you refund your games as long as it’s within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime. So if your time spent or your ownership of the  game has exceed that, it will be more of a special case if Steam will decide to issue a refund.

How to Refund a Game on Steam

1. Launch Steam

2. From your Steam Home Page, click on your profile picture at the upper right side of the screen and click on “Account Details”

3. You will be directed to your Steam Account Details. From here, click on “Purchase History.”

4. A list of games you have purchased will appear, and from there click on the game that you want refunded.

5. Click on “I’d like to request a refund” and fill in the details.

6. You have two options here. First is you can refund the amount to your Steam Wallet, and the other is to refund it to your payment method of choice. For this one, we’ll go ahead and refund it to our GCash account.

7. Steam will ask you why you need to refund this game, and you can cite the reason why.

8. When that’s done, click on “Submit Request”

9. Steam will be reviewing the refund, and from there simply wait until it’s approved.

The wait is typically a couple of hours to a day, and there’s no definite time frame for the approval or rejection. For this specific refund, the refund took about an hour and a half.

Do take note that you need to have a game of time less than two hours and it’s still within the two week window. So, for example, even if you have less than two hours of game time clocked on Steam but you already own the game for more than 14 days, it’s highly likely your refund request will be rejected. It’s going to be the same case if you’ve only had the game for a day but your game time passed the 2 hour window.

Final Thoughts

Steam’s refund procedure is quite easy, although the very limiting 2-hour window may seem to be very little especially if you wanted to try out the game. While, yes, there are games that can be completed for less than 2 hours, it would be a good idea if Steam made it proportional to logged time to beat the game instead of having a limit where you can explore the game for a bit only to encounter a gamebreaking bug later on and you’re way past the 2-hour mark.

We hope this guide has helped you request a refund on Steam.