Valve and Steam Customer Service is Cake In The Cake is a Lie, I gushed over being able to buy Steam games online. And once again, I decided to try to register my Half Life game with Steam. And once again I was disappointed.
I'm a software developer and I understand the need for licensing. I own two copies of every game my son and I play together. (I actually own 3 of Impossible Creatures because he misplaced one and I wasn't going to use some tool to load a CD image to fool his computer.) I have as many copies of WinXP as I have machines running it.
But, ID, Relic, Lucas Arts, even Microsoft, all work with the principle that if you have the physical media and the UPC, you own the game. I've almost never kept my receipt past 30 days for these games. I've gone and bought $9 new copies of Impossible Creatures from CompUSA years after the game was popular and I've had no problem with the licensing keys.
The way that Steam and Valve's support differs from this model is that they assume you are a thief - you are guilty until proven innocent. If I want to activate my Half Life game with Steam, mainly because I think it would be neat more than anything else, I've got to send them $10. It doesn't matter that I've owned the game for over 5 years. The assumption is that either I bought the game on eBay or I'm trying to steal the keys.
Even if I had my original receipt, the fact that it is over 90 days old would probably force me to pay the $10 fee anyway. I don't know, I wasn't smart enough to try and forge a
receipt.
It might be the case that I registered the games with Sierra Online. It might be the
case that I registered the game with Steam and I lost that account for some reason. It
just doesn't matter. I'm assumed to be the one who is trying to pull a fast one. They
will not tell you who has the keys registered. You can't see if it was an old account name
you used to have.
The reality is that someone could have used a license key generator to steal my key.
Or someone could have gotten the keys when they were in the retail store. Or duplicate keys may have been issued to retail boxes. But Valve and Steam are not willing to listen to you, work with you, or do anything other than insist that you pay $10 to get your keys.
It isn't the $10 which is sticking in my throat. It is the fact that if I give them that money, I have in fact admitted to being a thief. And at that point, they will have stolen something from me that I can never get back.
