An 18-Year-Old Set His Steam Game to $200 as a Joke, Then $1.3 Million in Sales Vanished Overnight in 6,707 Refunds

Eighteen-year-old Michael Major set out to make a cheap joke with his friends. He opened Steam, picked the maximum allowed price for a new listing, slapped together a small surreal walking simulator in a world called Schizopia, and shipped This Game Costs 200 Dollars through his one-person outfit, Stolen Valor Studios, on January 30, 2026. He expected zero sales. Instead, his Steam dashboard told him the game had pulled in $1.38 million in gross revenue and 6,717 purchases. Then 6,707 of those buyers asked for their money back.

That left Major with $2,045 in actual earnings from a product that briefly ranked among the most expensive non-AAA listings on the storefront, a number he confirmed to local New Hampshire outlet WMUR and which GameSpot surfaced on August 3. The math is brutal, almost comic, and almost certainly not the story Major thought he was writing when he picked the $200 ceiling, which is the literal hard cap Steam allows on any single game listing.

How 99.9 percent of the sales disappeared in 24 hours

Steam data Major shared in a video breakdown shows the run-up was almost surgical. The game sold 6,717 units. Of those, 6,707 buyers requested refunds, which is a 99.9 percent refund rate, the kind of line that does not happen with a real product launch. The lifetime gross revenue was $1.38 million, which means most of the refund wave came in within Steam's standard two-hour refund window, before players ever touched the download. The remaining 10 buyers, plus a couple of small post-refund conversions, are what kept the payout from zero.

Major's description for the game openly calls it a swindle, which on its face reads like an honest disclaimer. The store page is a first-person walk through a dim world of stacked beer and cigarette cases, framed as a psychological experience in which the developer tries to talk the player into believing the asking price is the real deal. The whole pitch is a wink, except for the part where the listing actually went viral, which is the opposite of the wink the developer intended.

Why almost all of the buyers were in one country

The bigger red flag is geography. Major told WMUR that the majority of the buyers were concentrated in China, an unusual distribution for a $200 joke from an unknown New Hampshire teen. The buyer pattern, plus an extremely high refund rate with near-zero playtime, lines up with the shape of the activity that money-laundering guides have been describing around expensive Steam listings for years. The idea is straightforward: a bad actor buys a high-priced game with stolen funds, collects whatever Steam credit or storefront incentive flows from the purchase, and then refunds the game while the proceeds are already in motion somewhere else.

Major said as much on camera. He has heard of expensive games being used for laundering of this kind, and he has no idea whether his title was just the random target or part of a coordinated campaign. He added, only half-joking, that he could be on a hit list right now. WMUR has reached out to Valve, the parent of Steam, for comment, and Valve has not publicly addressed the listing as of this writing.

What the community is saying

Replies under GameSpot's coverage of the story landed in roughly three camps, and reaction in the immediate window is limited. The first is bewilderment at the refund math, with users noting that 6,707 of 6,717 sales refunded in a tight burst is not a glitch, it is a pattern. The second is the developer-friendly crowd calling the situation an unfair surprise for a solo creator who never asked to be the front end of someone else's payment rail. The third is the more cynical faction pointing out that the underlying system, expensive Steam listings refundable inside two hours, prints an exploit for anyone willing to abuse it. None of these are consensus, and with a small handful of independent replies in the last two hours, it is too early to call a unified take.

Critical Pixel take

The takeaway here is not that an 18-year-old got scammed by his own gag. The takeaway is that Steam's two-hour refund window plus a $200 price ceiling plus a discoverable storefront makes the platform one of the friendliest laundering cash registers on the consumer internet, and Valve has known this for years. A solo teen walking away with $2,045 is the visible symptom. The real headline is the gap between what Steam pretends is a transparent marketplace and what the data shows is a hole big enough to swallow a $1.38 million ghost sale in 24 hours. If Valve does not change how it handles sudden high-volume refund clusters on high-priced indie listings, the next Stolen Valor Studios will not be a joke. It will be a quiet line item in someone else's ledger.

Until then, This Game Costs 200 Dollars is still live on Steam for the full $200, has one review from someone who swears it was not the worst financial decision of their life, and is described in its own store copy as the swindle to end all swindles. Whether the swindle was on the buyer, the seller, or the platform itself, the answer at this point is uncomfortably all three.