The Windows 10 Store will be offering self-service refunds in the near future. That feature is outlined in the latest ‘Insider’ Xbox One dashboard (screencapped on Reddit), and covers Windows 10 purchases too.
“We’re making changes to the Microsoft Store purchase experience by offering customers a simple way to instantly return digital products like games and apps through account.microsoft.com,” the notice reads. The process itself sounds fairly straightforward; a case of navigating to the Payment and Billing portion of your Microsoft account, and hitting the ‘Request a Refund’ button.
The general policy is very similar to Valve’s approach on Steam. For any given title you have a window of 14 days in which to refund, as long as the game has not been played for more than two hours. DLC, Season Passes, and various add-ons are not eligible (which, I believe, is also the case with Steam). Refund eligibility kicks in one day after a game’s release, and you also need to have downloaded and launched the game in question.
Microsoft are reserving the right to withdraw the refund feature for anybody found to be abusing it. What constitutes ‘abuse’ isn’t listed, but presumably if you’re constantly buying and refunding games then your account is going to get flagged.
While Microsoft’s app-based Windows 10 store has never been the most popular digital marketplace for PC users, this at least seems to be a positive step. The feature isn’t live yet, but since it’s present on ‘Insider’ builds it should be coming fairly soon.
