A win for Valve's refund policy

Image credit: Stolen Valor Studios

I do not have $200 to spare on one single video game right now. In this economy, spending such an obscene amount of dough on one game would be tantamount to throwing it down the drain, it would position me as a bourgeois elite who cares not for their fellow persons, it would label me as someone so silly that they should never be trusted with anything ever again. The funniest punchline to this would be that I did in fact spend $200 on a video game, specifically a video game called This Game Costs 200 Dollars, but I didn't do that because [see my opening comment]. Instead, I will tell you about how this game almost made its developer $1.3 million.

Earlier this year, 18 year old Michael Major released a video game called This Game Costs 10 Dollars. Two days later, he released a sequel, the aforementioned This Game Costs 200 Dollars. They are both ugly, asset flippy games where you don't really do anything, can't really achieve much, and are very clearly meant to see if anyone would even buy them. At the time of writing, both games have a single review each.

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But, as spotted by GamesRadar, WMUR-TV recently ran a report on Major's $200 game, and the process by which it came to make $1.3 million, at least for a little while. "I was this close," Major quips in the report, explaining the very simple reason the game costs $200: "$200 is the maximum you're allowed to price the game on Steam." Months after releasing it, he suddenly found that the game had made $1.3 million across 6717 sales. "I think I almost died," he said of the discovery.

The problem? 6707 of those copies were returned. What's most perplexing about this for everyone involved is that 6705 of those returned copies come from China, pretty much all of whom bought it and immediately refunded it without opening the game once. "They might be buying it to return it instantly so that they can get some kind of points for the highest amount possible without actually paying $200," Major posits. He's not entirely sure how any of this happened, noting that he's heard of other expensive games being used for money laundering, but has no clear answers on it ultimately.

Ultimately, Major is left with a little over $2000, presuming none of that gets refunded either, so, a win is a win I suppose? Either way, at the rate of things games will cost $200 in a few years anyway, so perhaps this is a depressing opportunity for us to all mentally prepare for our future.