What are your thoughts on Emika Games leaving the biz after a high amount of Steam refunds on his short games (despite the positive reviews)?
I'll be honest, I'd never heard of Emika Games before this incident. That's not necessarily a judgement on anything, and skimming their library on Steam, at least their games look nice visually. Though the fact they've put out three games this year and were lining up for a fourth gives me some pause.
A one-man development team, putting a new game out every two months, with visuals that look like this?
I'd imagine something in that equation would have to break down, and it seems like the trade off is that these games were very, very, very short. Steam's policy is that if you've played less than two hours of a game, you can get an instant, automated refund without even having to interact with tech support.
Can that policy be abused? Yes, definitely. There is an entire breed of streamer that will buy a game, play it for 90 minutes, and then refund the game live on stream. They don't get penalized for that, and that sucks. There needs to be another system over the top of that, like a limit on how many automated refunds you can get per quarter, or something. Imagine you have a maximum of three refund tokens, and once every three months, you get +1 added back to your pool. That'd curb abuse pretty fast.
But, maybe instead of releasing 3 games for a combined total of $30 in 6 months, and leaving yourself open to people abusing this system, you could try releasing one larger game for a singular total of $30 that takes longer than 90 minutes to finish. The dude is clearly putting the work in, and from my vantage point of never having played these games, it seems to be high quality work. It's just the release schedule that has made the developer vulnerable to this refund abuse.
Seems like there's an obvious solution there. Instead of a drip feed of cheap, short games, just spend more time making bigger games spaced further apart. People would probably be less inclined to abuse the system if they felt like they were getting more of their money's worth.
Heck, you don't even have to make it one continuous story. Take the games you already finished developing, bundle them around a launcher, and call it an anthology! People would love that! Look at all the buzz generated around things like The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Dread X Collection, or the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc! Nobody would even think about refunds until they'd finished multiple stories in the collection. Could even make sure that the launcher had a gentle nudge to "finish everything." Like a progression percentage surfaced for each game, or something.
It's a bummer that this happened to the developer, but it seems like an easy fix, to me.
