You shouldn’t pre-order games, but people do it all the time anyway. Increasingly, people have gotten in the habit of pre-ordering DLC too, paying up front for content that won’t be delivered for months or even years, if ever. Valve’s now cracking down on the whole thing with stricter rules for companies selling everything from DLC packs to season passes.
Steam will now require more transparency around season pass and DLC content, including details about what’s included and expected release dates. Anything that ends up delayed could then potentially be eligible for a partial refund. “By offering a Season Pass, you are promising future content,” the new guidelines to development partners read. “In the process of launching a Season Pass you will be asked to commit to a launch timing for each content release in the Season Pass. That launch timing is a commitment to both customers and Steam.”
Steam adds that while game development is complex and challenging, with delays sometimes necessary and understandable, companies will only get to reschedule DLC and season pass release timing once. “If you aren’t ready to clearly communicate about the content included in each DLC AND when each DLC will be ready for launch, you shouldn’t offer a Season Pass on Steam,” the company writes.
In addition, season passes are supposed to include at least one piece of content that’s already accessible at launch unless it’s for a currently unreleased game. Even if there aren’t customer complaints in a given instance, Steam reserves the right to auto-refund players for any potential violations of the new rules. And if any DLC is cancelled outright, players will get the “value of unreleased DLC” refunded into their accounts instead of relying on whatever in-game currency or other make-good the companies promise instead.
It sounds like the sections on Steam store pages beneath the buy button that list all of the microtransactions included in a game are about to get even more chaotic to look at, but at least it will hopefully incentivize companies to be more conservative about what they promise and charge for.