Amalgamation of franchises into a single launcher from Steam (e.g. Call of Duty) and refund requests.

I have about 350 hours on Warzone over the last couple of years. Yesterday, I ended up purchasing Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) to get back into the "multiplayer" aspect of Call of Duty, however, unfortunately due to some issues, I had to request a refund.

Total time span of about 1 hour and 10 minutes from purchasing MW3 to submitting that refund request. Did not touch it after that request was submitted.

Now of course that automated refund request was automatically denied. It cited my 350 hours of playtime that was above that 2 hour threshold. But what surprised me was that Steam Support (once ticket reached a human) still denied the request. I did end up chatting again, and net result was a refund, but they still stated that this was against the usual policy.

Looking into the Steam refund policies, it pretty much boils down to 2 weeks of ownership and 2 hours of playtime. Now one could argue MW3 is a DLC, but the policy is still the same (less than two hours played since the DLC purchase). All of which was met by my purchase, since my purchase to refund request was just over an hour, and the game was not touched at all since the request.

Again, thankful Steam issued a refund, but this could start getting quite muddy in the future if publishers continue down this path. I believe Halo Infinite has gone the same direction. Being in Canada we don't have as many refund rights as Australians, so it's a bit of a mess to deal with.

Scary path with these greedy publishers.