Steam closes refund policy loophole, comes up with official term for the thing where you can play a game early if you pre-order

pcgamer.com:

Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than «early access.» Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it's done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several days of «early access» with its Premium Edition, for instance.

Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the first meaning of early access, has had enough. It's now designating the latter scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, «Advanced Access.»

«Unlike Early Access, Advanced Access is not a unique model of development for a game, it's simply an opportunity to play a game before it fully releases on Steam,» says the platform.

Is it just the exact same term, but with a synonym for «early» swapped in? Yes. But I don't have a better suggestion, so I'll take it. Please, EA, Ubisoft, and everyone else, do us a favor and play along. (Or, even better, stop it with that annoying pre-order incentive altogether!)

I'm sure someone at Valve shares my irritation with the fluctuating meaning of «early access,» but the new distinction probably has less to do with that, and more to do with a refund loophole. Apparently, when you got advanced access to a game in the past, your pre-release playtime didn't count toward the two-hour refund window. Now that Steam has formalized advanced access, it does.

Steam's updated refund policy still includes one exception to the two-hour rule, «beta testing,» which refers to special beta builds of games that developers can make available for a limited time. So, if you accept an invite to a free playtest on Steam, it won't contribute to your playtime should you later buy the game. But if you pre-purchase a game, and then gain advanced access to it, your playtime will count toward the two-hour limit for automatic refund approval.

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