Courtesy of Valve.
I’ve read reports of international versions of The Orange Box being deactivated on other forums as well.
Now that bites. I use to order a lot of stuff via gogamer and they import alot. I was surprised how often i would get the euopean edition.
Hey wow, you can get the Orange Box on eBay for $25 + shipping if you buy a foreign edition. Way to stick up for the artists with your abstract pricing scheme and fascist enforcement, chet.
Edit: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=orange+box+pc&category0=
Wow.
So what happens if my job moves me to Russia or Ukraine? I’m prohibited from buying my Valve software locally?
Tarded.
Just another reason why services like steam are anti-consumer. Shrug.
The whole “download your junk again if you lose the CD” thing is a great selling point, but seeing entire accounts (with potentially hundreds of dollars worth of games on them revoked) is eye-popping.
The funny thing is that region coding hasn’t been brought to court much but the couple times that I’m aware of it hasn’t held up. Specifically, Italian and Australian courts have both held that mod chips for the purposes of subverting region coding are legal and in both those cases the courts came out very strongly against region coding, deeming it anti-competitive. I seem to remember the Italian Judge having a really funny quote, let me try and find it…
I imagine Italy has a much weaker entertainment lobby (RIAA/MPAA/etc) than the US does.
This is true, and the US’s DMCA is much stronger and and stricter than the EU’s anti-circumvention laws, but I think you’d be surprised by the US courts. It seems fairly easy to get moronic legislation passed in the US but a lot harder to put laws to moronic uses (EDIT: I realize that this, in general, isn’t true. The only law I really follow is digital copyright.), especially with regards to copyright misuse. Despite the wording of the DMCA from what I’ve seen the stances of many judges seems to be that it doesn’t grant copyright holders any new rights, it exists to protect the rights that were already in place before the DMCA was enacted. Take a look at the outcomes of Lexmark vs. Static Control Components or the case about the garage door openers (the name of the players escapes me right now) for examples of this ideology.
I always find games being cheaper on Steam than any other place I can buy them.
Customs kill any discount I get by finding something through e-bay or Amazon.
Fascist bastards :(
What do you mean by “Finally”? Were you waiting for someone to start doing this?
Derek: i’d say he was being sarcastic. Also probably because it was inevitable.
I think someone’s sarcasm detector is kaput.
-Julian
Its just been flaky for the last few weeks. I do seem to recall a few games doing something like this, but it was about 5 or so years ago.
Eep, the Steam forums have several threads locked on the topic. It sounds even worse in that it’s not just Orange Box being tagged, it’s everything on that account as well.
Not nice. This is a PR problem for Valve, they need to address it ASAP.
Complete bullshit. But hey, it’s nice to know that Valve reserves the right to terminate your account and any games on it for any reason they like, whenever they like. Someone take this to court alreay.
This just reinforces the idea that you are not really buying their games, but leasing them. It’s nice to be able to download your games and install them anywhere, but they are making you give up a lot of ownership you’ve traditionally had in the past to be able to do this.
Furthermore, it’s just confusing. It’s never a good idea to confuse consumers. It makes the decision not to buy easier.
I still think Stardock nailed it – you can download their games and get the CDs shipped to you a few days later. It’s the best of both worlds.
Don’t you need an account to get patches and whatever? They can still effectively obliterate your ability to play the game if they really want to. Unless you want to play GalCiv2 1.0.
Of course my position is that when I buy software I don’t need to “activate” it so to hell with them. I don’t play in that sandbox.
Aren’t games in Thailand like $10 or whatever, legit? Except I’m kind of afraid to give them my credit card # since it sounds too cheap to be true… maybe one of these days when there’s a good credit card from cash service.