270,000 copies sold and 55,000 returns are not very logical figures for a single game. Does a bestseller (on the margins of the independent circuit) and an extraordinary number of returns make sense in the same title? The two figures did not add up to Mateo Covic and he exposed a problem that mainly affects independent developers: you cannot make games that are too short.
The game. ‘Paddle Paddle Paddle’ is a cooperative physics and platform game that Covic signs under the name Zoroarts, and is his second commercial title after ‘Makis Adventure’, from 2023. Published by Assemble Entertainment, It went on sale on July 25, 2025 for $4.99. Covic, 23, built it alone in just four months; It takes just over three hours to complete if played slowly. But many players don’t play leisurely.
The complaint. On July 5, Covic published in X that his game accumulated more than 55,000 refunds: 21% of all sales, despite the fact that the 90% of the reviews were positive. “This should not be possible,” he wrote. But it is: the Steam refund policy allows you to return any game played less than two hours and purchased less than fourteen days ago, without having to give any verifiable reason.
System failure. The policy is not intended, as she herself acknowledges, “as a way to get free games,” and using it this way can result in the loss of the right to request future refunds. But the two-hour limit is the same whether the game lasts six or sixty: it does not correspond to the actual length of each title. In the European Union, in fact, the legal right of withdrawal in distance purchases expressly excludes digital content once the download begins with the consent of the buyer, so this consumer protection comes from Steam’s commercial policy.
It’s not the first time. In its day we already had How a studio built an entire game around all of this: a survival of terror that turned the return into a challenge, rewarding anyone who finished it before the limit with the possibility of recovering the money. And Valve has already touched the refund policy to prevent an early access title from being played indefinitely and return it just before launch. With Covic the other side of the same problem appears, finished and enjoyed games that are returned anyway.
And in this way the temptation is generated to stretch a game just to exceed two hours. Short genres have been defending their length for years as a design decision, not as a defect. If the economic penalty for being short grows, the pressure to stuff development with padding grows with it, and that precisely harms games that make a point of their brevity.
Nuances. Days after his tweet, Covic sat down to crunch the numbers, and qualified his initial anger: 20% refunds are common among games of the type to which ‘Paddle Paddle Paddle’ belongs, and 10% is the general average on Steam. With 270,000 copies sold, its 55,000 returns are not that far from that range. He also recognized that the real driver of sales was the bargain price, with a 40% discount, not the refund policy: at less than three dollars, people bought without a second thought.
That doesn’t stop Covic from thinking the system is flawed: Steam doesn’t check the reasons for each return, and he, as a developer, would find it helpful to see returns labeled “too difficult.” Of the nearly 826,000 gross dollars that the game generated, 158,000 were lost directly in returns (before subtracting the Steam commission, the distribution with the publisher and German taxes that are around 42%). And yet, none of this made him consider artificially extending his games.
For speaking. The post where Covic expressed his complaints went viral: he received very hostile messages, and a good part of that response translated into protest reviews. Many understood his complaint as an attack on returns in general, something that he himself has denied. Now, in the game file, the historical set of reviews remains Very Positive (88% out of 1,414 reviews), but the most recent ones have fallen to Mixed (57% out of 69). In any case, their proposal that Valve include an estimated departure time next to the price, and removing “too short” as a valid reason for refund once that time has passed, are still very reasonable requests so that the indie scene continues to evolve at its own pace, and not at that of the AAAs.
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