The Steam Summer Sale has seen many, many games purchased and that in turn, means there are a lot more people sending refund requests Valve's way. At its peak during the beginning of the sale, this saw as many as 330,000 support requests go through, most of them requests for refunds. At the time of writing, 205,000 were submitted within the past 24 hours, but this had little to no impact on their response time.
Valve has often been criticised for its support structure, taking more than a week to respond to some concerns, or being slow with refunds, but in 2017 it's taken major steps to address that, automating a number of systems and taking on more support staff. This has led to a huge reduction in wait times for various concerns and cut back on the number of people waiting for a response by dramatic margins.
What once saw 50,000 people waiting for days at a time, is now down to just eight thousand, peaking at 13,500 in the past month and a half. None of those people wait more than a day and a half for their problems, but almost everyone has their requests fulfilled within an hour or two - especially those requesting refunds.
PCGamer tallied up a few more numbers and believes that Valve may have received more than 1.5 million refund requests since the start of the Summer Sale and looking at its own stat and graphing page, response time and the number of people waiting in the queue has barely moved an inch.
Valve did confirm in a statement that not all refund requests are fulfilled, but said that the numbers on the stat page are accurate. So while a million and a half gamers may not all have received their money back, it's likely that a large majority did and it happened in a timely manner. That's a big improvement over the Valve support system of old.
