Valve locks out PC gamers who purchased The Orange Box from a territory not of their own
October 30th, 2007 by astrotriforce
Did you buy The Orange Box for PC from a territory not of your own? If you did, you may find yourself unable to play the recently-released and packed-to-the-gills smash-hit (lots of dashes, yah).
Most of these people bought the game to save a few bucks from a Thailand online shop, and along with the game they of course got the serial numbers. Activation of the purchased games went off without incident, but Valve took issue with these games bought in other territories and has begun locking out accounts of people living in North America who owned one of these serial numbers from Thailand. They’ll get the message that the game was purchased in an “incorrect territory”.
What’s worse off is that people who did do this and tried to fix it by buying a legit copy (for example on Valve’s Steam download service) have found themselves out of luck. Some users were having problems getting the legit copy to play after they have had their international key locked . . .
And now after some very steamed fans (pardon the pun) protested loudly, Valve’s Doug Lombardi said this to Shacknews:
“Valve uses Steam for territory control to make sure products authorized for use in certain territories are not being distributed and used outside of those territories. In this case, a Thai website was selling retail box product keys for Thailand to people outside of Thailand. Since those keys are only for use in Thailand, people who purchased product keys from the Thai website are not able to use those product keys in other territories. 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. Anyone having this problem should contact Steam Support to have the Thai key removed from their Steam account.”
So if you want to have any hope of playing the Orange Box and you are one of these people, then you’re only choice is to pick up a legit copy and if you can’t get it to work then contact Valve and cross your fingers. There is one good thing learned from this though . . . you may think twice about buying PC games from another country! — Via Opposable Thumbs and Shacknews