Third party launchers counting towards play time

[Keelo]

Hello!
I'm wondering whether Steam Support, when looking at the total playtime for a refund request, also takes into account the time spent downloading a game from a third party launcher (since you'd appear as "in game" in that state). I'm asking this because it would be logical to think that if you have a not so fast internet connection you'd be basically renouncing to the refund chance.

[Wolf Knight]

the auto refund only looks at time played and time since purchase. if you go over, you can submit a manual ticket and make the request there. Select the purchase, then select "I have a question". if the game is thru a launcher, the launcher is what steam sees as the EXE, support is aware of this and will take that into consideration.

[Jerry]

From what I remember, this issue became really relevant the first time through a Microsoft Flight Simulator in 2020, whose launcher included an immense download. Since then, there is definitely an awareness on Valves side for this.

[Keelo]

I see! I was just wondering out of curiosity since I've never dealt with this kind of requests. Thank you!

[wuddih]

that situation is so rare and is only caused by a couple of games, so its case-by-case.

[Kargor]

Steam (technically) doesn't know about third-party DRM or downloaders.

When you click "play", Steam launches "the game". Whether that game is actually the game, or something else -- Steam doesn't know.

Now, the game itself could take care of this -- or rather, the launcher. If that launcher determines that it doesn't actually want to run the game but do a download instead, it could launch that as a separate program, and terminate. Then the other program would continue running (to do the download), but Steam would see a "game has finished".

Of course, there would be no way for the downloader to "reconnect" to Steam when launching the actual game; they'd have to compromise and just pop up a message for the user, telling them that the download/install has completed, and they can launch the game now.
MAYBE, but I'm not 100% sure about that, they can do the same that the desktop-shortcuts do to basically make Steam launch the game for them, without the user having to click on anything.