Is there anything more to this? I’ve returned dozens of games that I didn’t end up liking and the only consequence I’ve faced is that games with trading cards don’t start dropping them until 2 hours of play time, which I think is completely fair.
There most certainly is. This is not Steam’s default refund procedure in the slightest. I’d be willing to bet they were abusing the system somehow and support caught them red handed.
I'm not sure how to abuse the return system. It's not like I pirate anything from Steam. And I used the return process through Steam - exactly once, as mentioned above. If I wasn't meant to do a thing, then I would think the process should not let me do it. But I returned it in good faith, for a game that managed to make me rage quit in less than an hour - I like to think at least that I am usually patient but I wasn't putting up with that shit.
If a Valve employee with rights to look into it is reading this - I'd love to know what I did so wrong. But given that human explanations from modern software based corporations are non-existent, I will assume I was treated as per their returns policy.
And the outcome has worked in Steams favour. I buy for (account) life now, for better or for worse. As previously mentioned, I don't care about the money so much as the social.
But my decision making process to drop the significant money required for Steam hardware will assume the return/warranty is worth precisely zero.