One clever indie dev has made quite the piece of statement art about Steam's refund policies: Steam Refunds work.)
It's an odd, clever, meta-textual bit of game design. If I beat the game in less than two hours, is it now ethical to refund it? If I don't beat it, but refund it inside that two hour window anyway, am I breaking some kind of implicit pact with not just the developer, but myself?
To many developers, s refunding games they've beaten deeply discourages someone from making a game that takes less than two hours to play. Last year, a developer made a public publicly shamed someone who left a positive review into re-buying their game.
Suffice to say, Steam's two hour refund window has been a source of weird troubles over the years. Not just for indies, either: There are also mundane problems like MS Flight Simulator taking so long to that it blew past the two hour window.
