As usual with any kind of refund only handful of people will bother enough to request their money back, especially when it means waiting at least 7 days for an approval.

Of course it’s not like you have to do anything difficult, so the share of people requesting refunds on Steam will probably be higher compared to your average TV shop.

But let’s imagine a perfect world with perfectly rational customers, where every person that have played the game for less than 2 hours will at least think of requesting a refund from Steam.

How many refunds are we talking about?

The Xpaw of SteamDB did some calculations based on SteamSpy data and what you’re about to read might shock you (Sorry, couldn’t resist):

59% of all paid Steam games have median playtime of less than 2 hours.

That’s 2656 games to be exact. And it only includes games that have been already released — Early Access or otherwise.

Most of the Steam games could be considered short by Steam owns standards

Now it looks scary. And it is scary. But of course those smaller games might be big in numbers, but they don’t sell this well, right?

True, to some extent.

Shorter games sell worse than longer games

We’re still talking about 356 million copies combined of games that have been played for less than 2 hours by an average player. And it doesn’t account for people that bought a game but never bothered to launch it.

Of course you still have 14 days window to request a refund, so it won’t affect most of the already sold games. But it gives you an understanding on how many games could be affected by refunds.

60% of all owned paid games on Steam were either played for less than 2 hours or not played at all,

meaning they should be eligible for refund if players cared enough to request it withing the 14 days of purchase.

60% of owned copies of paid games were technically eligible for refund at some point

This difference between short and long games is also visible in average price.

Shorter games cost almost twice as less

So, yeah, longer games cost almost twice as more and sell twice as much on average compared to shorter ones.

Is it bad?

Well, It depends.

For starters, not all short games are necessarily bad. You might get a satisfying gameplay experience from 1-hour arcade or story-driven game and you might get irritated by long and tedious roguelike or survivalcraft that requires hundreds of hours to master.

It would be interesting to see if most of the short games on Steam are intended to be short or they’re simply bad games.

Turns out — yes, on average short games get lower userscore, but difference isn’t as dramatic as you’d expect.

Shorter games are rated lower, but difference isn’t huge

So, no, shorter games aren’t necessarily all bad.

What’s the takeaway here?

There are a lot of short games on Steam — in fact, most of Steam games could be considered short by Steam own standards.

These games do not sell as well as long games, are rated lower and cost less, but nevertheless, they account for 37% of all game copies owned on Steam.