Teen dev made $1.38M on Steam but kept only $2,045

A $200 Joke That Went Sideways in Every Direction

Michael Major is 18 years old, lives in New Hampshire, and recently became the unlikely protagonist of one of Steam’s stranger economic parables. In January he released a game called This Game Costs $200, a follow-up to his earlier gag title This Game Costs $10. He set the price at Steam’s maximum, fully expecting the experiment to go nowhere. Instead, as reported by WMUR-TV, 6,717 people bought it.

Then 6,707 of them asked for their money back.

That is a 99.9 percent refund rate. Gross lifetime revenue hit $1.38 million. Major’s actual payout: $2,045. “I almost died,” he admitted, which feels like the only proportionate response to watching over a million dollars evaporate in real time.

How Steam’s Refund Window Turned a Stunt Into a Statistical Anomaly

Steam’s two-hour refund policy is the engine that made the whole loop possible. A buyer can purchase a title, poke around for less than two hours, return it, and pay essentially nothing. For a $200 novelty game with no real gameplay hook to speak of, that window is basically a free preview with a dramatic headline attached.

The game’s Steam page leans hard into the absurdity. It bills itself as “the swindle to end all swindles” and drops players into a fictional city called Schizopia, populated with beer and cigarettes. The page has one review. That reviewer spent six minutes with the game and concluded that $200 was not, in fact, the worst purchase of a life that once included eating a sandwich soaked in toilet water. High praise, relative to the competition.

Major noted that the overwhelming bulk of purchases traced back to China, a detail that sent him down a rabbit hole of theories involving money laundering and, apparently, hit lists. Valve has not publicly addressed whether anything irregular triggered the unusual buying pattern.

Steam’s Relationship With Price Has Always Been a Little Abstract

This is not an isolated incident. The platform has been producing these strange economic stories with increasing regularity. Just last month, according to the Dexerto report, another developer watched 55,000 refunds pour in after players burned through his game faster than the refund clock allowed. Just last year, a collector’s 40,000-game Steam library was valued at more than the average American house.

What Major’s situation illustrates, maybe more clearly than any of those, is how completely detached transaction volume can be from actual earnings. The number $1.38 million sounds like a life-changing windfall. The number $2,045 sounds like a decent month of part-time shifts. Both describe the same game, the same sales period, the same developer.

For Major, the whole thing functions as an accidental lesson in platform economics that no game design course would dare assign. He built something as a joke, priced it to fail, and ended up with a case study in how refund architecture can turn a storefront into something closer to a revolving door. He gets to keep the story either way, which at this point might be worth more than the $2,045.