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People have to own games in order to review them on Steam, so the logic works out. Will Valve safeguard against this loophole in their already not-exactly-ironclad defenses? Here’s hoping.

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The Big Picture

I reached out to Valve for comment on these concerns, but as of writing they had yet to respond to my inquiries.

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Certainly, it’s a good thing that Valve has finally added a proper refund option to Steam. A very good thing. However, as is often the case with Valve, they appear to have paired their good intentions with worryingly little foresight. This is the sort of feature that people—some just trying to recoup the precious little money they have or hoping to righteously hit back at a big publisher who did them wrong, others looking for a new way to scam people outright—will pick apart like vultures. Once again, Valve stared into an unfeeling crystal ball of numbers. They didn’t really consider how this might affect people.

Here’s hoping they address these potential problems soon. With this new system out in the wild, time is, quite literally, money.

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Top image credit: MickBoere

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To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.