How are Steam refunds going?

Steam recently instituted a much more liberal refund policy which lets customers get a full refund for games for any reason, as long as they haven't played it too much. In order to get a refund, you must have played the game for less than two hours, and bought it within the last two weeks.

A lot of game studios were worried that the policy would get abused and cost them a lot of money. And indeed, some small publishers have seen scary large numbers - up to 72% of games returned, in the case of some titles.

Will these numbers stabilize as people get over the newness of the policy? Or will Steam reverse itself and pull the plug on refunds, the way they recently did on that whole "charge money for game mods" thing? Only time will tell!

Image courtesy Flickr/Trey Ratcliff