What happens is the money is held in what is essentially the Steam version of an escrow. Steam hangs onto the money for a couple weeks (to address that refund period) and then afterwards the funds get released to the dev after Steam takes their cut.
So if you do a drive by buy-review-refund thing, the dev gains NOTHING. Steam has to eat the cost of paying for the credit card transaction, and you have to waste a few days for the money to come back after you refund. I don't know how I learned this, but I think it was because of a video called The Day Before or The Day After - yeah - that scam. People were worried that the developers did a rugpull on people who bought the game (because it was more or less a shoddily made asset flip with lots of false promises). People thought that the devs got away with a rugpull (since not everyone was going to refund it) and that the money already went to the devs.
What happened apparently is the money was being held by Valve, then Valve learned about the scam that game was. Valve then used that money to refund the game to anyone who bought it, even those who played it past the 2 hour limit (it was that bad) and the rest of the money Valve just kept.
So yeah, in the end the dev gains nothing but now there's a new review in their review section lol
Do developers still get any money if one were to buy it play it for five minutes and then post a negative review followed by a refund?
No.
What happens is the money is held in what is essentially the Steam version of an escrow. Steam hangs onto the money for a couple weeks (to address that refund period) and then afterwards the funds get released to the dev after Steam takes their cut.
So if you do a drive by buy-review-refund thing, the dev gains NOTHING. Steam has to eat the cost of paying for the credit card transaction, and you have to waste a few days for the money to come back after you refund. I don't know how I learned this, but I think it was because of a video called The Day Before or The Day After - yeah - that scam. People were worried that the developers did a rugpull on people who bought the game (because it was more or less a shoddily made asset flip with lots of false promises). People thought that the devs got away with a rugpull (since not everyone was going to refund it) and that the money already went to the devs.
What happened apparently is the money was being held by Valve, then Valve learned about the scam that game was. Valve then used that money to refund the game to anyone who bought it, even those who played it past the 2 hour limit (it was that bad) and the rest of the money Valve just kept.
So yeah, in the end the dev gains nothing but now there's a new review in their review section lol