A $200 Steam game made 1.38 million dollars and paid its creator 2,045 dollars. That gap is not a rounding error or a platform cut. It is what happens when 6,707 of 6,717 buyers ask for their money back.
It goes by the name This Game Costs 200 Dollars. Michael Major, an 18-year-old from New Hampshire, put it on Steam earlier this year as a joke, and told local station WMUR he picked that number because it was the highest price Steam would let him set. He assumed nobody would ever click buy.
Steam figures usually travel as good news. A record player count, a strong launch week, a number worth writing up, as with Project Zomboid passing 120,000 players last week. This one runs the other way.
Then people started buying the $200 Steam game
They did click buy. When Major saw revenue of 1.3 million dollars, he said he “almost died”.
The refunds followed almost as fast. Steam lets anyone reclaim a purchase within fourteen days as long as they have played under two hours, no reason required. On a game priced at 199.99 dollars, that window is worth a lot of money to test.
Sales data he shared shows 6,717 copies sold and 6,707 refunded. That is 99.9 percent. Ten buyers kept it.
Major also noticed something he could not explain. Most of the purchases came from China. He said he had heard of people using expensive Steam listings to move money around. He also stressed that he has no idea whether that happened here, and neither do we.
The joke is still on sale
Here is the part that has gone unmentioned in most of the coverage. The listing is still live.
Steam still shows This Game Costs 200 Dollars at 199.99 dollars, credited to Stolen Valor Studios, released on 30 January. Its own store description calls it “the swindle to end all swindles”, which reads differently now that the numbers are public.
So a joke about an absurd price became an accidental demonstration of how much protection Steam’s refund rule actually gives buyers, and how little certainty it leaves a developer holding a revenue figure. A million-dollar dashboard meant nothing until the fourteen days ran out.
It is a useful reminder whenever a headline number appears next to a game. Gross revenue on Steam is a first draft, not a result. Valve’s own policies keep drawing attention for the same reason, as our look at the gap between players and Valve’s AI policy found. GameSpot covered his full account in this write-up of his interview.
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