How to refund WARDOGS on Steam

Steam’s rule: 14 days and under two hours

WARDOGS is bought through Steam, so Valve’s policy is the one that applies. Valve “will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.” For a game bought at or after release, that period is 14 days from purchase. An approved refund arrives within a week, to your Steam Wallet or the original payment method.

Valve’s Steam Refunds policy →

1. 01

   Go to help.steampowered.com

   Sign in with the account that owns WARDOGS. This is the only place Valve takes refund requests.

2. 02

   Find the WARDOGS purchase

   Pick it from your recent purchases and choose the refund option.

3. 03

   Give a reason and submit

   Valve refunds “for any reason” inside the window, so the reason does not decide it. An approved refund is paid within a week.

What BULKHEAD says about refunding

BULKHEAD has said it twice, in writing. Its pre-order post of 11 August: “we encourage you to try out the game and refund if the game doesn’t live up to your expectations.” And in a developer post on the game’s Steam board on 4 September, about Linux: “So please, refund the game if you mistakenly bought it thinking you would be able to run Linux via Proton on September 10th.” Neither changes Valve’s rules — the studio cannot extend the window — but both say plainly that it would rather you refund than keep a game you do not want.

WARDOGS on Linux, Mac and Steam Deck →

If you pre-ordered or played the closed beta

Valve’s rule for titles bought before release: “the two-hour playtime limit for refunds will apply (except for beta testing), but the 14-day period for refunds will not start until the release date.” WARDOGS released into Early Access on 10 September 2026, so a pre-order’s 14 days ran from that date and ended around 24 September. Pre-ordering also gave access to the closed beta of 21–23 August. Valve’s text does not spell out how hours played in a pre-launch beta are counted against the two hours, and BULKHEAD has not said either — the request goes to Valve, which decides.

The Supporter Pack and the Supporter Edition

WARDOGS is sold three ways on the US store: the game at $39.99, the Supporter Pack DLC at $12.99 on its own, and the Supporter Edition bundle at $49.99. Each falls under a different line of Valve’s policy.

WARDOGS price and editions →

• Supporter Pack (DLC): refundable “within fourteen days of purchase, and if the underlying title has been played for less than two hours since the DLC was purchased, so long as the DLC has not been consumed, modified or transferred.”
• Supporter Edition (bundle): refundable in full “so long as none of the items in the bundle have been transferred, and if the combined usage time for all items in the bundle is less than two hours.”
• In-game purchases in non-Valve games are not refundable through Steam unless the developer opts in. BULKHEAD’s stated model is “Earn cosmetics by playing”, and the cash and gold bars in WARDOGS are earned in matches, not bought, so this line has nothing to apply to today.

Outside the window

Valve’s policy says that “even if you fall outside of the refund rules we’ve described, you can ask for a refund anyway and we’ll take a look”, and that consumers in some jurisdictions have additional rights where a game is faulty. Neither is a promise. Two other lines are worth knowing: Valve does not count refunding a game bought just before a sale and rebuying it at the sale price as abuse, and its rule that a ban removes the right to a refund names VAC — WARDOGS uses the Elytra kernel-level anti-cheat, which the policy does not mention.

WARDOGS anti-cheat and bans →

The other refund: what “CASH REFUNDED” means at the end of a match

Inside the game, the end-of-match screen has a CASH REFUNDED row beside cash spent and cash earned. It has nothing to do with Steam: it is part of your last kit coming back when the match ends. BULKHEAD’s CEO, Joe Brammer, set out the rule on X on 14 September: “The refund is worked out from your last completed vendor purchase, and it only covers the gap between that loadout cost and what you earned against it.” He gave the worked example in the table, then the catch that explains most $0 rows: “That purchase is only refundable for 20 score ticks. Once the window closes, it's gone. Buy early, play a long round, get nothing back.” He also said the end-screen numbers “won't reconcile with the refund figure even when it's behaving”, and called the invisible window “a bad design, and that's on us. Looking at it.” No patch note through Season 02 (14 October) mentions the refund, so this is the rule as stated on 14 September, not re-confirmed since.

Giving up, respawning and what a life costs →

• Never refunded: “Ammo and magazines are never refundable”.
• Lost and found: “Items you lose, drop or have stolen come off the refundable value. Items you pick up add to it, capped at your original loadout cost”.
• Death: “Dying resets it. It recalculates after your next vendor purchase” — so giving up throws the refund away along with the kit.
• Vehicles: “For vehicles the owner gets the refund, and has to be in the vehicle at match end unless it's still in the spawn zone”.
• Fines: “Fines like friendly fire are ignored”.
• Not established: whether a player who is downed but not dead at match end is refunded (players on Steam disagree), whether being revived counts as dying, how long a score tick is, and whether the 20 ticks or the 0.9 changed in Season 02.

Common questions