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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

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Welcome to our Half-Life 2: The Orange Box competition!
Since Half-Life 2: The Orange Box will be released one week from now, we’re giving away one copy of the 5-in-1 FPS game collection for either PC, Xbox 360 or PS3. “Five games in one box?”, I hear you ask… Yes indeed, The Orange Box includes all of the following awesome games: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

You have a chance to win it for free until its October 10th launch when the competition ends, and we’ll order the game from your local Amazon store the next day or whenever it’s released in your part of the world.

What do you need to do to win? Pick a number between 1 and 100 and leave your guess in the comments below. Oh and what system do you want it for?

What are the rules? All you have to do is leave a comment with your lucky guess on this page. Fill out your real email so we can contact you if you win (your email will be invisible to other readers, only the site staff can see it). Also, if you won our previous contest (Halo 3) then you cannot enter twice in a row, that wouldn’t be fair to all the other participants. That’s it, good luck!

A trailer for the newest games in The Orange Box:

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