But that would hardly be a problem in practice where in the majority of cases the games indeed run sufficiently fast and are sufficiently interesting to not make use of the refund ability. Some devs said that the refund rate is as low as 3%.

But actually you're right. It's not like you could use that feature to try out every single game on Steam (I would not want to) and then only continue with about 10 games in the end. It would also be a lot of useless financial back and forth transactions.

But I like it because in the really difficult cases, where you are not sure if the game is really good and you are not sure if it really runs smoothly enough and the game is expensive - it offers a way to minimize the risk for you.

It's probably not something for ... don't know if the game is good, just wanna try, maybe it surprises me, if I'm lucky. For that one would need a different approach.

Agreed. This is one of the features im really missing nowadays. While youtube gameplay videos do give you some information about the game they just can't convey the feeling if the game is right for me.

My point was that if people routinely used that refund policy in order to demo games (just to see if they like them), like one person refunding 5-10 games every week, and maybe keeping (buying) only a couple per month.

I presume Valve also has some threshold how often they let one user to use the refunds. That's what most stores do with refunds, if they see some person is constantly refunding stuff, they might block them from purchasing anything anymore. But yeah, as long as you use it relatively rarely, I guess you can use it to demo some games.

The free weekends and gametimes are more meant for demoing games (and then deciding whether you want to buy it), that's why you don't have to pay for those games beforehand. You only pay after the decision. The refund is more like that you had already decided to buy the game, but something comes up (the game doesn't work on your system, or the game is just otherwise utterly broken, or somesuch).

For the longest time, this wasn't true. Getting a refund through steam was a total pain for a long time, and part of the agreement in the ToS was that they'd refund like 1 game for you, and then refuse to ever do it again...

That's the best solution probably. Download a game, play it, pay for it not before a certain play time. That would be fully okay.

Aka: the good old trial period.

Yeah, demos are a rare sight these days. I can only remember a few I've downloaded on PC in the last few years, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Dying Light, and Titanfall (game time). They were great demos though, showing off the core mechanics of the game, and Titanfall was the full game, playable for 2 days. It was also a good way to know if the games would run on your hardware. I usually look up videos on YouTube for that though, watching videos of games running on the same graphics card I have, and seeing how it performs.

I've downloaded tons of demos on my Xbox One in the last year though. Destiny, Forza Horizon 2, Forza 6, Elite: Dangerous, Trials Fusion, and Crimsonland. The Metro-games also had demos released on consoles recently as well. Why are demos so abundant on consoles but not PC?

Well, those two hours are definitely good, made use of refund system in two cases and everything worked great. As an idea, one game was Rust. It's an early access game. These are the specs:
OS: Windows 7 64bit
Processor: 2 ghz
Memory: 8 GB RAM
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 8 GB available space

I meet all the requirements, but guess what, game it's unplayable, as i don't have such a good card. I'm not talking like "well, it run at 20 fps, not fancy enough". I waited around 30 minutes for it to load the world and i got errors two times. Basically, one from these two hours were wasted in loading screen. Then, in game, i was really getting something like 2-3 FPS. I would think that minimum specs would be in order for that game to be playable, not in order for that game to run. 2-3 FPS it's not playable.

And that's a happy case, as i got the game in order to play it with some friends, so i tried it right after i got it. But i have many games that i bought on sale and i didn't got into playing them in those 2 weeks. Not to mention that not all sites offer refund periods.

Alan Wake it's another example. There i meet the "Recommended" settings. But game moves pretty bad on low settings. Not as bad as Rust, but bad enough in order to be unplayable and annoying.

As consumer, i feel robed by buying something based on specs and not being able to enjoy it. That's the difference when you buy physical products too. If product it's faulty due to factory errors, at purchase, you are entitled to get your refund. But if the product does not have manufacturing problems, but it does not work as intended from different problems, you have the seller guarantee and you can apply it on that product. And the seller it's obliged to offer you enough information regarding the usage of the product.

In case of games, these last part of what i said earlier it's often ignored, as i'm not receiving correct information about the product that i'm buying. Minimum specs might mean that the game will run, but if i'm not able to enjoy it, what it's the point in order for me to want that product?

Without demos avaliable, i wonder if that's why Let's Plays are more popular than they could be. I mean it's usually more fun to play something yourself rather than watching someone else play a game; However sometimes it's the personality you want to watch react to a scenario and not the game. Either way, the market is probably worse for not having more demos... Then again with steam and it's greenlite, a number of those shoddy games certainly aren't worth the effort in making a demo.

I've been playing Rust every now and then since 2013, and that game runs bad on any system. It was better optimized in its previous state. Settings on max and 60 fps was fully possible on my budget-rig. They removed that version of Rust in late 2014, and remade the game from scratch. That is the current build of the game. I have all settings on low, but the fps is not great. Anywhere from 20 to 60 fps.

Not quite sure what that means (enough information? Like minimum requirements?), but I recall down here many PC game stores had signs that refunds would not be offered for opened PC games. It was stated it was customer's obligation to check they meet the PC game requirements.

I am unsure if it would have been possible to revert that and get the money back anyway even through court, but I bet no one tried it. Anyway, to me it always felt "if you buy it, you keep it".

http://store.steampowered.com/freestuff/demos/

Anyway, there was thread like this 3-4 months ago (with already a lot of replies and insights) but I can't find it back.

I really wish GOG would add demos to some games. Especially since there are more and more games with demos on steam, recent examples: freedom planet, ys origin and not a hero.

I'd still consider it common/standard practice to change resolution based on performance. But there's a lot more to this than just that. If you double the resolution you have 4x as many pixels to draw. If graphics were CPU driven, that means you'd need at least 4x higher performance to get the same result.

But something odd is the younger generation never worked with low resolution. 320x240 or 640x480, or in some games 1024x768 on the high end, or limited to 256 colors. Instead all of them are brought up with the 360's and 7th gen consoles and are trained to expect everything to be HD. Not only that huge differences in how the engines and graphics work has changed. Doom, Quake and most older games didn't have extra filters or effects. You won't find AA, physics engines, post processing, hair tessellation, bloom, blur, or any of these other effects, instead engines ran raw just to get the game to run and gave you basic 3D with sound&music. Sorta why today the original quake or a openGL port could potentially run at 3,000 frames a second.

Other advantages of lower resolution was there were lower polygon models and lower textures, meaning the games were also smaller in size. Full games ran from a CD or less. I love to reference Soul Reaver as it was an awesome game at the time, even at higher resolutions (1024x768) although the graphics started to really show it's unpolished side then. But most of the time you'd be lucky to run it at 800x600 on modern computers (at the time), and the natural blur with the CRT monitors gave you a bit of AA for free :P

I guess to say, a number of gamers today are spoiled and don't know how far we've come, and aren't interested, they just expect things to look better and be better each year. As such a number of franchises don't change much (if at all). With that i'd say i would love to see a lot more PS2 quality of games, at least in terms of hardware requirements and complexity, while models and textures could be probably double of the PS2 (but not nearly close enough to be PS3).

a good idea, half my gog library wouldnt exist if I had a choice to test them out first. probably why they dont offer demos lol