Depends on the game. It is usually around 2 hours for the first drop on a newly activated or bought game.

If you have a recent refund it can be around 3 hours.

Also if the game is/was set to private it will not drop cards.

Have you refunded a game before? I did it a couple times and my time changed to 3+ hours to start getting drops...Another secret hidden Valve change from a couple years ago to punish people for refunding. I used to get card drops instantly before I refunded. Dirty game they are playing with their customers as usual they don't announce or warn anyone that it is going to happen when you do it. It should say in fine print warning you your card drops will take longer but they are lazy and just make changes with no warning system in place. Same thing with pending market change and numerous other shadow changes they've made the last couple years. Their lawyers must tell them they can get away with it.

Originally posted by jerk store:

Have you refunded a game before? I did it a couple times and my time changed to 3+ hours to start getting drops...Another secret hidden Valve change from a couple years ago to punish people for refunding. I used to get card drops instantly before I refunded. Dirty game they are playing with their customers as usual they don't announce or warn anyone that it is going to happen when you do it. It should say in fine print warning you your card drops will take longer but they are lazy and just make changes with no warning system in place. Same thing with pending market change and numerous other shadow changes they've made the last couple years. Their lawyers must tell them they can get away with it.

So what you are saying is they are preventing people from abusing the refund policy to farm free cards. Which they can then turn around, and either sell on the market, or convert over into gems to buy packs. Oh no how terrible people not being able to game the system whatever shall we do. This seems like a perfectly sane and fair response if the case. If you don't own a game you have no business getting the cards. Are you trying to come across as a Karen, because you are with this little rant.

Originally posted by jerk store:

Have you refunded a game before? I did it a couple times and my time changed to 3+ hours to start getting drops...Another secret hidden Valve change from a couple years ago to punish people for refunding. I used to get card drops instantly before I refunded. Dirty game they are playing with their customers as usual they don't announce or warn anyone that it is going to happen when you do it. It should say in fine print warning you your card drops will take longer but they are lazy and just make changes with no warning system in place. Same thing with pending market change and numerous other shadow changes they've made the last couple years. Their lawyers must tell them they can get away with it.

Any abuse that can be done in steam, can be done hundreds of times a second by bot farms and completely flood the marketplace, refund system, support system with crap from scammers that would stop genuine users getting assistance.

The developers/publishers can make it so the cards only drop after an hour each (fastest is 15 minutes I think), so even with the system waiting an extra couple of hours for the refund to expire for certain people doesn't actually make that much difference in (for a game with 15 cards and thus 8 drops and set to an hour each it would be 10 hours to get them all with the refund delay instead of 8).

Originally posted by Callahan420:

Depends on the game. It is usually around 2 hours for the first drop on a newly activated or bought game.

If you have a recent refund it can be around 3 hours.

Also if the game is/was set to private it will not drop cards.

But still didn't refund a single game

Originally posted by Kapetan_Mutavi:

Originally posted by Callahan420:

Depends on the game. It is usually around 2 hours for the first drop on a newly activated or bought game.

If you have a recent refund it can be around 3 hours.

Also if the game is/was set to private it will not drop cards.

But still didn't refund a single game

That's simply a possibile reason, not the only reason.

Originally posted by jerk store:

Have you refunded a game before? I did it a couple times and my time changed to 3+ hours to start getting drops...Another secret hidden Valve change from a couple years ago to punish people for refunding. I used to get card drops instantly before I refunded. Dirty game they are playing with their customers as usual they don't announce or warn anyone that it is going to happen when you do it. It should say in fine print warning you your card drops will take longer but they are lazy and just make changes with no warning system in place. Same thing with pending market change and numerous other shadow changes they've made the last couple years. Their lawyers must tell them they can get away with it.

i had this delay to get the cards too, a year passed by without any refund everything went back to normal.