The Glory that is Steam Activation Codes
Only now do I realize the good deed that Valve has truly done giving the world Steam. I speak not of the community, as fabulous as that is, nor of the ability to buy and receive video games naked, though that's nice too. No, I speak of activation codes.
After reading through this thread on Half Life lore and listening to some people review Half Life 2 (Team Fremont Live's Podcast to be specific) I got the hankering for Half Life the first, to remember the good old days and curse at jumping puzzles. I don't feel like paying ten bucks for something I know I already own so I go busting through my CD spool to see if I can scrounge up the original Half Life.
After about ten minutes I finally find a Half Life CD. The first Disk of Half Life Game of the Year edition. Of course this is one disk of three so I go scrounging for the others, since I'm pretty sure Opposing Force and Blue Shift were in that package and those were kinda fun. After another ten minutes of looking though random CDs I'm about to open up Firefox and see what the bittorrent crowd has to offer when I remember: CD keys!
See I've always been annoyed by CD keys, and never remember to keep the original packaging, so I got into the habit of writing the CD key on the front of every first disk of a game I have. I check and there it is. And I have Steam too, don't I? So I pop in the activation code into Steam to see what happens.
Now I'm happily downloading Half Life, Blue Shift, Opposing Force, Counter Strike, and quite a few other mods. While I almost certainly won't be playing things like Team Fortress Classic any time soon the option to do so is simply wonderful. Say what you will about their lack of customer service, Steam just saved me a fair amount of time and/or money and lets me continue my tradition of ignoring my CDs after an install.
So have any of you had an experience with Steam's activation code service? Any downsides that I'm not seeing here? Because so far this seems to be awesome in a bottle.
Remember, only by treating everyone with dignity and respect can we maintain the element of surprise for that inevitable day when we wipe our enemies from the face of the Earth.
Funnily enough, I throught you'd be linking to this.
I get the whole "hate big corporation" attitude but reading that I cant help but think of the old saying "you get what you pay for"
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
Down in the Park with a friend called Five.
http://wumusicgroup.com/
I have a PGP encrypted Excel spreadsheet with every CD key I've ever purchased. Knowing that Steam lets you use them like that is awesome, as many of my discs have mysteriously disappeared shortly after the kids installed them on their PCs.
-- My Biking Team --
Is it only Valve games supported by this feature or could I take CDKeys for games I own (like Quake 3?) that are also on Steam and add them as well?
Gamertag: RiverRatMatt
Witchlight Cycle: Sithis of the Thelis'Thale Clan, Dragonborn Paladin of Moradin
Only Valve games, sadly.
Xbox Live: StaatsM
Yeah, I guess I would be pissed if I was in that position, but at the same time, you should know you're taking a risk if you're buying a game from Russia or Asia or something that requires some type of online activation and that you need to download from the site.
It's mostly the retailer's fault since most of those things have it printed right on the retail box saying if the game is purchased outside of the region, it's invalid and/or illegal. I know when I imported the Korean version of NWN Platinum Edition it had that on it but it was mostly because I had lost all the original disks when I bought the expansions seperately, so I didn't need the CD key anyways. If all they are sending is the activation key, then it's the online store that's dishonest, not Valve.
EDIT: Well, apparently some people got the boxed copies shipped to them too, so if that's the case I guess it would be a little annoying if there's no warning label. I still can't get worked up about this, though.
Your favourite game is over-rated.
And we all know, region coding will save PC gaming.
That's an excellent idea! Thanks! I wish I had thought of doing something similar long ago.
I had an urge to re-play The Settlers 2 a few years back (just after Settlers 4 was released, I think). I found the CD, but the manual and CD key had gone missing. I did send an email over to Blue Byte's support address, but didn't hear anything back -- nor did I really expect to, considering that I was essentially asking them to send me a replacement CD key, with basically nothing to back up my legitimate purchase of the game.
Steam: Merphle | XBL: Merphle
This is generally true, but there are a few exceptions. For example, my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. CD key won't register on Steam, but there are a few non-Valve games that will work. See this link for a list of keys and key ranges that will register on Steam.
We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name "Who" for the interrogative pronoun "who," etc. - D.F.Wallace
That's awesome for sure. Same thing happened to me. When Steam Community beta started, I reinstalled Steam and I had no games registered there and I felt an urge to play TFC! So I looked for my old HL box and I found it. I register this single CDKEY and I'm not sure how, but I got HL, Blue Shift, Counter Strike, DMC, TFC, everything ready to download.
For now on, I'm buying games through Steam whenever I have that option.
XBL/PSN Gamertag: KillTrash
The greatest part of Steam was, for me, when I registered my original Half-Life key.
The key I got when I got HL1 on release day. I was that sad...
It registered it as a Half Life Platinum Pack key. So I basically got.. well, everything. HL, OpFor, Blue Shift, CS, DoD, etc. etc. etc.
That was pretty cool.
Mystic Violet wrote:
I've tried numerous times to register my old copy of Half-Life with my Steam account but it always says it's already been registered. How can this be? I guess it's time to contact Valve customer support and figure out what's going on.
Looks like they only blocked Orange Box. My HL2 is Asian version but it still works.
XBox Live|Tshirts|My Music|GameFly|xfire
After digging around all the Steam support pages I found out I can reset my KEY. All I have to do is mail in my actual printed KEY along with this form, and since I don't have a receipt less than 90 days old, $10 for a service charge. Only problem, I can buy Half-Life for $10 as it is. Of course none of this should matter since my KEY was never registered in the first place, so suck my (expletive) Valve! You screwed up!
Edit: I still love Valve.
Hrm, and now Steam community seems to be down. Can't log in, can't get achievements.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
Yeah when Steam came out I was happy to know that I gained the expansion packs for free! I was also happy to find out that my copy of Dark Messiah that I picked up for a steal let me just input the key without even needing to put the DVD in the drive! I wish more non-valve games supported this, like my already purchased iD games library.
Xbox Live | Steam | Xfire | Last.fm
Aye, I've got to agree with that. For the most part I find region-coding digital products to be an annoyance. Rather, I find that region-coded products that are difficult to circumvent annoying. (Like Apple building regions into their dvd drives, rather than their software.)
BUT, tiered pricing that allows folks outside of the world's top economies to play Valve games without paying two months' salary for the Orange Box makes sense, and that can only work if the lower-cost versions can't circulate back to other regions. I can't fault Valve for this. You *DO* get what you pay for, and they are under no responsibility to make sure that illicit attempts to avoid paying full price work.
We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name "Who" for the interrogative pronoun "who," etc. - D.F.Wallace
It seems to go down around the same time every day.
Funny, I just tried putting in my HL key as well, and it said it's already registered. If I had just purchased a game and had this problem (and was therefore unable to play a game I payed for) I'd be pretty outraged. This is one of the problems with internet activation and DRM, and mailing them $10 isn't really an appropriate solution.
Kat on Cally wrote:
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Well I sorta did here:
But then it wasn't the trust of my post. I was too stoked that my key worked for easy downloads.
Yeah, sounds like someone with a keygen got "lucky" and pulled your key randomly. Which is a problem with this kind of system. Still, I've had that happen on games like Warcraft 3 which is, in many ways, more annoying for me. At least if my key was taken on this I could install the original game, though not the expansions. Warcraft 3 I'd still want to play online and someone taking my key prevents me from doing that. :-\
And as a side note I find it strange that this site converts my BBCode into HTML when I quote myself but I can't use HTML instead of BBCode. Wiggi.
Remember, only by treating everyone with dignity and respect can we maintain the element of surprise for that inevitable day when we wipe our enemies from the face of the Earth.
I'm pretty sure that is a drupal setting. I get all kinds of confused, since we use a similar-looking drupal site for internal communications at work, but that one only allows HTML formatting. I'm pretty consistent about formating in BBCode there and HTML here. Thank G*ddess for the edit button.
We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name "Who" for the interrogative pronoun "who," etc. - D.F.Wallace
It's a Drupal bug. Some posts just quote with HTML for some reason.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
Chances are this wont ever happen on a new game.. your taking a specific situation with a really old game that had a much simpler key to keygen and has been out for so long that it could be keygen'd.
These days buying a boxed copy and registering it on Steam your chances of having someone duplicate your key have to be what 1 in 1 million or more?
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
Down in the Park with a friend called Five.
http://wumusicgroup.com/