SCUM Developer Gamepires Have Discovered A Way To Circumvent Steam’s Refund Policy

SCUM Developer Gamepires Have Discovered A Way To Circumvent Steam’s Refund Policy
Credit: DT Gaming via YouTube

SCUM is a title that is sold on the Steam platform, an open-world survival multiplayer with character customization, progression, and everything else you would expect from the trope.  They do add minutiae such as metabolism and inertia to the genre, but it’s delivered well within the spectrum of the Open-World-Survival-Building that has found itself being mimicked infinitely in recent years.  And there are zombies, because of course.

The game currently shows Mixed reviews on Steam, with 67% of 28,790 recommending the game to others.  All of this is merely setting the scene for what actually is occurring, to give you some presence of environment and happenstance to the modern event.

As far back as August 2018, and likely far earlier, SCUM continues to run in the background process even after you close the game and select a new one to play.  That background process continues to report playtime to Steam, bringing players well past their limited two-hour window for refunds, and thus they keep the game.

The Steam forums are thankfully dated when people comment on various issues, and one such developer from Gamepires happened to comment on the bug report as a frustrated user found out he was locked with the title.  Even supplying Steam with evidence of the bug, their refund was still refused based on hours played.

Still, it isn’t as tasty a morsel as it could be.  At least until you add in that this ‘bug’ is still ongoing today, with SCUM running as a background process, locking people out of a refund when they try it and realize that it isn’t their cup of tea.

A year and a half later, and the incidental ‘bug’ that locks people out of safeguarding themselves from games that don’t accurately display what they offer still somehow remains in existence.

I hope the new content will make it up to you, chap.

The forum discussion does end with advice on how to report to Steam that the bug is at fault, and the topic eventually died on the same day after all parties were assumedly made whole.  Yet is hows a vulnerability towards customers that Valve have apparently not made an effort to close, yet; hanging an application means fewer refunds if your users don’t catch on quick enough, which means more coin in the coffers.

General cynicism and skepticism aside, it’s possible that the person who identified themself as a developer on the forum isn’t; there’s no denotation next to his title as there typically is on Steam forums, and there’s little more than a user claiming to be.  So it’s possible, however slightly, that SCUM still isn’t aware of this bug.

If they are, however, it’s a titular behavior.

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