Steam will now let you cancel your own pre-orders

As someone who can spend hours looking at reviews, videos and interpreting smoke signals before taking the plunge on a new game, pre-orders don't seem like the best idea. Mainly because they're usually a terrible idea - as anyone who bought X: Rebirth in advance will probably tell you. Pre-ordering on Steam is an even less tempting proposition, thanks to Valve's great money-rake grabbing your hard-earned cash the very moment you click 'confirm'. According to users on the Steam forums , however, you can now cancel pre-orders without having to open a support ticket - just so long as the game hasn't been released yet.

Previously, if you'd changed your mind about a game you'd pre-ordered you had to contact Valve and hope they'd refund you the wonga (for our American readers, 'wonga' is a word which here means 'simoleons'). Now, as the image below shows, you can initiate this process yourself with the newly added, and seemingly automated, 'Refund an item' link. It's not clear yet whether you'll be refunded in Steam wallet credit or whether the money will go back to your card - so if you're on the fence about a game, it's still best to wait until impressions hit, no matter how tempting the digital pre-order tat is.

Thanks, Polygon and Valve Time .

TOPICS
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.

Latest in Platforms
Screenshot of Children of Clay showing a mysterious clay model
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 10, 2025)
discord
Brace yourself for Discord to get worse: Reports swirl that the company is in talks with bankers about opening itself up to shareholders
The Spy from Team Fortress 2 holds up a folder with an accusatory expression.
Steam users react ecstatically to update that lets them access their heaving game notes via the web, also it fixes Monster Hunter Wilds video recording
HasanAbi
Twitch streamer Hasan Piker suspended after saying Republicans would 'kill Rick Scott' if they really cared about Medicare fraud
Screenshot from Faceminer showing a PC desktop with several windows open
Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 3, 2025)
PORTSMOUTH, UNITED KINGDOM - OCTOBER 20: A man smokes a cigarette while he looks at a smart phone screen on October 20, 2024 in Portsmouth, England. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
Meta says sorry for turning Instagram into a horror show of violence, gore, dead bodies, and other graphic content that 'should not have been recommended'
Latest in News
Man facing camera
The Day Before studio reportedly sues Russian website for calling infamous disaster-game a 'scam'
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam