Hey guys, I finally got round to doing something that I’ve been avoiding for a whole year, and that’s reading through people’s reasons for refunding Epic Battle Fantasy 5.
Steam asks users to select a reason for their refund, and also gives them the option to leave a comment. 3.5% of EBF5 units were refunded, and 0.3% were cancelled due to payment issues. Let’s take a look at the reasons for refunds, starting with the most common…
By far the biggest reason for refunds was that the game was “not fun” – this was roughly 50% of the refunds. Some examples include:
“I just found it boring and repetetive.”
“Some parts appealed to me, but others did not.” (puzzles, graphics, music, story, difficulty level, etc)
“The other games in the series are free and more or less just as good.”
“It’s decent but I don’t like it enough for $15.”
“Bought it ’cause it had good reviews but it wasn’t fun or what I expected.”
“I liked the other games but I guess my tastes have changed or I’ve just had enough of it.”
I’m alright with those. I much prefer users admitting that the game isn’t for them and getting a refund, rather than trying to get their money’s worth and leaving a bad review after a few hours of boredom.
Quite a lot of people bought the game before getting their launch-day discount coupon, and wished to purchase it again later. Totally fair.
There was a surprising amount of accidental purchases:
“I don’t really want to play it now, but maybe later.”
“I meant to buy it as a gift for someone.”
“My friend bought it on my account as a joke.”
Many of these accidental purchases were also people not realising that the game was only for Windows.
Altogether, around 20% of the refunds were due to various accidental purchases.
Poor performance was the main refund reason that I expected to see, but it wasn’t that common after all. Maybe around 15-20% of the refunds were due to “low framerate”, “system requirements not met”, “game crashes”, etc. Very few people specified that they could not run the game at all, which was nice to see.
A handful of people said that a lack of controller support was the reason that they refunded the game – but not enough for me to consider adding it. Similarly, a handful of people mentioned a lack of 4k support, or fullscreen mode not working for whatever reason. I can’t support every type of hardware, especially cutting-edge stuff, so I’m not gonna beat myself up about that – and some of these issues could have been resolved by sending me a message anyway.
Overall, I think things went very well, and this feedback was more positive than I expected. A high refund rate is not always a bad thing – it may mean a lot of people are impulse buying your game because it looks good. EBF5’s refund rate is a little bit below the average, from what I recall.
