Microsoft Flight Simulator (the new one) released this week and its significant size has some Steam players worried they won’t be eligible for a refund, should they decide the sky is not for them. However, Valve has confirmed that the download won’t count as time spent playing the game.
Which may sound obvious to some, but Flight Simulator is only a 528MB download on Steam with the bulk of the actual game coming as a 127GB “update” from within the game. So, you’re technically playing the game because you had to launch it to get the update. This matters because Steam’s refund policy requires that you spent less than two hours playing a game in order to qualify for your money back. I don’t know what your connections are like, but 127GB would take mine about 30 hours, assuming I busied myself with offline activities during that time and didn’t have load shedding. Why is it so big? They’ve basically mapped the world.
Fortunately, according to a statement to PC Gamer, Valve will not count the download time as play time for Flight Simulator.
The time it takes your machine to download the additional content will not be counted against the Steam Refund Policy.
Crisis averted.