Steam has often been criticized for the fact that the buyer has little recourse if a game they purchased either doesn't work or turns out to be terrible. That's about to change, as the PC gaming service is set to begin offering refunds within 14 days.

"You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam — for any reason," the official page states. "Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it."

The reasoning doesn't seem that important, as long as a few milestones haven't been crossed in your play.

"Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within fourteen days of purchase, and the title has been played for less than two hours," the company explained. "There are more details below, but even if you fall outside of the refund rules we’ve described, you can ask for a refund anyway and we’ll take a look."

The rules for most games purchased via Steam seem to be pretty cut and dry: If you played it under two hours you can get a full refund within two weeks, and it's possible you can still see a refund in other situations depending on Valve's evaluation of the situation.

DLC may be refunded at the same basic terms, although "Steam will be unable to give refunds for some third party DLC (for example, if the DLC irreversibly levels up a game character)."

If you have questions you can read the post for other edge cases, including in-game purchases and refunds on bundles, but this is a huge step forward for the service.

Steam is, by far, the most popular way players buy games online and offering refunds in this time frame will hopefully allow players to buy with a bit more confidence. It will also allow the service to monitor problem games if refund queries spike around certain titles.

"You can request a refund or get other assistance with your Steam purchases at help.steampowered.com," the company said.