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Valve Responds to Steam Territory Deactivations
An anonymous reader passed us a link to Shack News, which is reporting on official commentary from Doug Lombardi of Valve about the international Orange Box code problem we talked about yesterday. According to Lombardi, the folks who bought copies of the game from a Thai gaming store are pretty much out of luck. They'll need to buy a local copy to have a working version. That said, they should be able to replace the old code with a new one. "'Some of these users have subsequently purchased a legal copy after realizing the issue and were having difficulty removing the illegitimate keys from their Steam accounts,' added Lombardi. 'Anyone having this problem should contact Steam Support to have the Thai key removed from their Steam account.'"
just some arbitrary policy that Valve probably buried deep in some EULA or something.
You know that EULA stands for End User License AGREEMENT, right?
Not their fault if you didn't read what you agreed to.
"Some of these users have subsequently purchased a SECOND legal copy after realizing the issue and were STILL having difficulty" Fixed that for Doug.
Property is theft.
You mean the software they purchased that was clearly labeled as being region-restricted?
News flash: It's perfectly legal for you to buy DVDs from Europe or Japan. Just don't go crying "Class Action Lawsuit!" when you find it won't play back in your Region 1 DVD player, as region locking is also perfectly legal.
And to carry on the 'perfectly legal' stuff - it's perfectly legal for you to kill the region locking on your DVD player, and it's perfectly legal for you to spoof your location info to bypass Valve's region check. Doesn't mean they have to make it easy or should be forced into not region locking in the first place.