This pretty much sums it up. This proposed practice will only hurt sellers, and I can tell you right now with all of the problems going on behind the scenes in the marketplace if there is a return to this easily abused policy it will be the final nail in the coffin for many developers. I guess it isn’t clear to people who aren’t sellers, but when you put hard work and time into your products you do not enjoy it when people try to steal it - whether it’s through piracy, or abusing the refund system. People keep demanding higher and higher quality work from the marketplace, and then want to implement hurtful policies that will chase away sellers like a swarm of bees.
People keep bringing up Steam as a justification for this, yet they always leave out the fact that steam DRM prevents their users from playing a title once it has been refunded. The same can not be said of the UE4 marketplace. All someone has to do is copy the contents of the product to another folder, get a refund and they just stole those assets from you. This happened a lot back when the marketplace policy was “refund for any reason” a year ago. Using piracy as an excuse is equally mad. Just because piracy exists doesn’t mean we should have to make it easier for people to steal our products.
You also assume the people who are trying to get refunds are always “good users”. If there was something broken in my package and it didn’t work as advertised, I as a seller would have no problems with issuing a refund. It’s the policy, and aside from that I as a seller would endorse it. However when someone makes up extremely ridiculous reasons in order to justify one (such as rotating assets randomly and claiming they don’t work together, even though the example map demonstrates how they work together and subsequently proves that the way the user approached it was wrong) then you are not deserving of a refund. I only had 2 refund attempts, and both were varying degrees of my example above. The first kept changing his story every time he realized it wasn’t enough to justify a refund. The second refused to look at the example map and then photographed some randomly put together assets that obviously didn’t belong together and in that way. These aren’t legitimate reasons for a refund. But according to your proposed system, they would have been allowed to take their money back and undoubtedly keep the assets (because I highly doubt they would have deleted the content from their projects). The policy you are referring to is an honor system, it was done before and failed miserably. That is why we have the current policy which offers protection to both buyers and sellers. If a product doesn’t work as advertised, you can get a refund. It’s as simple as that. However you have to demonstrate how it doesn’t work as advertised, and the seller gets a to either fix it or explain how it does. Is it perfect? Maybe not. But it is a fairer system than the one we had before.
I honestly can’t believe some of the things I’ve seen people write in . Especially the vilification of sellers who don’t want their hard earned work stolen from them for $0. It’s enough that we have to deal with pirates, but if we have to add refund abusers to that I can assure you that many of the people who are helping to keep the marketplace alive with quality content will no longer do so. (And yes, as someone mentioned above the marketplace is officially barely breaking even). I can personally say that if we were ever to go back to that policy I will take all of my content off. And to those who say that we are somehow anti customer - I have provided high quality assets and customer service for over a year. Furthermore I have released free content expansions with enough content that I could have sold it in a separate pack. I resent the notion that we are somehow anti customer because we want to protect the integrity of our products and earnings. I aim to deliver the best customer experience I can, it’s my number one goal in providing my service. If you have a legitimate problem with one of my packs, then I will have zero problems issuing a refund. But if you are obviously making up things in order to justify one, then I won’t be inclined to do so. I’ve had over 500 sales and only 2 refund requests who tried to do just that. It may be a small percentage, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a seller.