I think it's about what you play. I play indie games and it's hard for a small studio to show you the middle finger after they released a bad game. But I agree with you if we talk about the rich game publishers/studios.

Have your game executable check and see if it has been running for 2+ hours on exit and if not, have it live-lock by appearing to exit but instead daemonizing into the background silently until it has been running for 2 hours, then exit cleanly. :)

I agree with you, there are many gamers that only look to steam, but there are many gamers that don't.

Notch refused to use steam and sold his port (aka minecraft) for +2 billion USD.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/notch-explains-why-you-cant-find-minecraft-on-steam/
http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/15/technology/minecraft-microsoft/index.html

You do what you like to do and you keep doing that. The money always shows up later. You just have to believe in yourself.

This is true, but Minecraft is a one in one million exception.

"Much more awesome than certain other digital distribution platforms that we would NOT want to release Minecraft on."

does he mean here?

edit: less likely

Steam said they'll fully reimburse you if you buy something BEFORE sale and immediately REBUY the game on sale next day as a gift. It's covered in their refund statement. Just don't play the game more than 2 hours and / or try to abuse it.

Ironic thing is there are like 3000 version of Minecraft on steam all with different names.......

No, this does not follow naturally. The period was chosen by Valve, not by the customers and anyway nobody knows what consumers would do if they had their say and if under these conditions publishers would still be able to exist at all. You ignore that not every game is the same (length) and not every publisher can afford to make big long games. A fixed period threatens shorter games much more and I highly doubt that this is really in the consumers best interest. You don't want to make these distinctions probably because it would undermine your assumption that publishers cannot act very consumer friendly too. But they would if you would leave it to them to choose a time period you would get competition and consumers could just choose the game with the best value for the money.

This is almost a bit like socialism. Instead of letting consumers and producers haggle it out, the all dominating power in the middle just decides what is good for all. The surprise is a bit that it is actually rather more good than bad, except for very short games where it is more bad than good (for publishers and consumers alike) IMHO.

That is nice of them. Although in general I would recommend to never really buy outside of sales, They are so frequent, every game is on sale like every 3 months on average and with price watching services like isthereanydeal.com one can easily stay informed without much effort.

I'll take this under advisement.

Are we still talking about the refund policy? I'm pretty sure Steam implemented it to obey the laws of various Western governments which are appointed by the people. Steam made a change in their policy a few months ago and used a loophole to skirt the EU consumer directive, but its probably closed now. This has been a long time coming.

And you on the other hand assume that customers cannot act in a publisher friendly manner (i.e., they will cheat), and that this would have a significant negative effect on publishers. That's the same argument piracy gets, which is why we have DRM (which presumably you support).

At least I acknowledge that GOG never ever could implement this consumer friendly 2 hour testing period because without DRM you either give it forever to the customer or not at all, without DRM you cannot just give it out for 2 hours. So, if a 2 hour testing period is consumer friendly, then DRM free is consumer unfriendly in this regard.

Or in other words: GOG would certainly not refund you if you just say that you played the game only for 2 hours (one week after purchase). They would not trust you. Steam found a way to let DRM look quite friendly.

You musta loved Greenmangaming's old system then. Obtrusive fucking DRM (securom that had to phone home all the time if memory serves) with the ability to "sell games back".

You mean Demos basically.
I'd assume that we all want good old Demos back for games. Just the first 1- 2 levels of a game to test if someone likes it. If someone plays a Demo then tries to play the game and it fails technically and crashes you can still refund it as you can already do it on GoG. Aside that you actually don't need a refund system if you have Demos.