Valve: No Man’s Sky is not exempt from Steam’s 2-hour refund policy

If you’ve played more than two hours of No Man’s Sky, you’ll get no guarantee that you’ll get your money back when you ask for a refund on Steam.

Valve has clarified that it is not making an exception to how refunds work through its Steam distribution portal for the space-exploration game No Man’s Sky. Over the weekend, a post on the No Man’s Sky forum on Reddit surged to the top of the front page after claiming that Steam is offering refunds no matter how long you’ve played it. Many games have expressed disappointment with developer Hello Games’ procedurally generated universe simulator, and that has led to many wondering about returning the game. Typically, customers are only guaranteed a refund from the PC gaming digital store if they’ve played less than two hours and have owned the game for less than two weeks. All of that is still the case for No Man’s Sky. The confusion seems to spring from Valve enabling anyone — regardless of playtime or ownership duration — to request a refund for all games.

In response to the community, Valve has updated the Steam page for No Man’s Sky to let everyone know that it has not made any changes to how refund works through its store.

“The standard Steam refund policy applies to No Man’s Sky,” reads the notice. “There are no special exemptions available.”

The update then goes on to include a link to the Steam Refunds information page. Valve breaks down how the process works in that explainer:

“Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within fourteen days of purchase, and the title has been played for less than two hours. There are more details below, but even if you fall outside of the refund rules we’ve described, you can ask for a refund anyway and we’ll take a look.”

So it’s likely that many people who are asking for a refund for No Man’s Sky are getting one even if they have played for more than two hours because Valve manually approved the request. But you shouldn’t expect to have the option to buy the game, play it for 30 hours over the next week, and then get your money back automatically. Those kinds of expectations will likely lead to you only owning a pretty good game.