18-Year-Old’s $200 Steam Satire “This Game Costs 200 Dollars” Flops on Refunds
A tiny Steam experiment aimed at gamers with a sense of irony has turned into a lesson about refunds: an 18-year-old developer sold his joke 2D title for $200—and almost every buyer returned it, leaving him with far less money than the sales headline suggested.
The $200 satire that dared players to “prove” it
The game is called “This Game Costs 200 Dollars.” Its creator, Michael Major, is an 18-year-old from the United States, and the concept is straightforward: the price is set extremely high on purpose, with the product itself positioned as pure satire and “psychological” persuasion.
On Steam, the store description leans into the gag with intentionally broad, overconfident language—framing the purchase as worth “every cent,” while also describing the experience as an attempt to convince you the game truly deserves $200 (or whatever the equivalent is in your local currency). The pitch also leans into the theme of being “taken for a ride,” with the text calling it “the scam of all scams” and admitting that the developer expects some people to buy it out of curiosity.
Sales, then mass refunds
Once the title went live, the numbers quickly flipped from impressive to bleak for the developer.
- “This Game Costs 200 Dollars” was sold on Steam a total of 6,717 times.
- The gross revenue from those purchases was reported at roughly $1.38 million.
- Of the 6,717 buyers, 6,707 refunded the game afterward.
- That puts the refund rate at about 99.9%, meaning almost no one kept the game.
- Because refunds reversed the earnings, Major reportedly ended up with only $2,045 from the sales activity.
Major said he was neither surprised nor especially disappointed by how things played out, noting he didn’t expect the money to actually land in his account in full.
Why Valve’s refund rules mattered
This outcome also lines up with Steam’s refund system: players can request refunds for purchased games as long as they follow Valve’s conditions and timing rules. In other words, a prank priced at $200 is only profitable if buyers keep it long enough to avoid the refund window.
