An 18-year-old built a $200 Steam game as a joke, and thousands of strangers actually bought it, then wanted their money back.
It’s the sort of stunt Steam keeps producing lately, with developers pricing games absurdly high just to see who bites.
Just last month, one dev watched 55,000 refunds roll in after players sped through his game in minutes flat. But this time, the numbers got a lot stranger.
As reported by WMUR-TV, Michael Major, an 18-year-old from New Hampshire, released This Game Costs $200 in January as a follow-up to his earlier gag, This Game Costs $10.
He set the price at Steam’s maximum, fully expecting nobody to bite. Instead, 6,717 people bought it. Then 6,707 of them refunded it, a 99.9 percent return rate that left Major stunned. “I almost died,” he admitted. Lifetime revenue hit $1.38 million. His actual payout, though, is just $2,045.
Most of the purchases traced back to China, which sent Major spiraling into theories involving money laundering and hit lists. Steam’s two-hour refund window means the whole loop, buy, dabble, return, costs almost nothing, and Valve has not said whether anything shady triggered the surge.
The game’s Steam page bills itself as “the swindle to end all swindles,” featuring beer, cigarettes, and a fictional city called Schizopia. Its lone review, all six minutes of it, called $200 not quite the worst purchase of a life that once included eating a sandwich soaked in toilet water.
Steam’s economics keep getting stranger by the month. Just last year, one collector’s 40,000-game library turned out to be worth more than the average house, proof that on this platform, value was always going to be a little made up.
