One of the biggest changes Valve has made to Steam in recent years is the introduction of the refund system. This is now a regularly used feature within Steam and while most developers choose to keep their refund statistics hidden, this week Garry Newman, creator of Rust, revealed that his early access survival game has been refunded 329,970 times.
In total, that's $4.3 million claimed back via refunds. Now those numbers seem huge but in reality, this only accounts for around six percent of Rust's total sales and is in line with other Early Access survival games.
Added sales stats to our backend today. These are Rust's real Steam Refund figures. pic.twitter.com/IhjUsJUN9N
— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) June 28, 2017
When asked about the main reason players give for refunding, Newman told PCGamesN that it usually comes down to poor performance or the game not being fun for that person, which he sees as a fair assessment. After all, survival games aren't going to be to everyone's taste and games in early access are rarely fully optimised for smooth performance across a wide range of systems.
KitGuru Says: With Rust being one of the more well-known survival games, I would imagine it has seen more refunds than most. What was the last game you guys refunded?
a lot of people get banned from servers for cheating in rust. Like, A LOT OF PEOPLE. I bet a lot of these are new account purchased to get back on the server and grief it with hacks, Garry is just trying not to sound like a dick imo.
I think the early access thing is a rather joke on many games especially when they stay in alpha/beta for 3-4+ years
Are you you ever going to get something done about these endless I make xxx $ a day posts it all I see on this site