Valve and Steam wont let me play my games. Down with the copy protection systems!

Many years back I bought Half life. One of the most memorable gaming experiences for me ever. I loved the game. Some years ago Half life 2 was released but I did not buy it then for some reasons and since then I always postponed it. I did not borrow it from a friend and I did not illegally downloaded it just to see how it is. I wanted to have a legal, original, hard retail copy of the game to play it. Fast forward to the present I finally bought a copy of The Orange Box today. An excellent package containing Half Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. I drove back to my house happy to try the game that I wanted to play for years.

I was reading about Steam and Valve's take on piracy and game distribution and I was hearing the complaints of the users. I had not seen anything with with my own eyes though. When I got back home I popped in the disc and the installation process started. It stroke me that it went immediately online to create a steam account while I had not even blinked my eyes twice or the system had not said anything about the game. I created the steam account and then proceeded to enter the CD key. As soon as I pressed "Next" the system informed me that this was a duplicate CD key!What? I repeat: WTF? I just bought the game and it is the first time I install it and I am using a fresh steam account. I was very, very angry. There was a link on the form to go to the support site.

In the support site it got me around 5 minutes to be able to see what was where and find out where I needed to go. Very badly designed, full of irrelevant information and misplaced links. When I got to where I was supposed to be I got confused by an obnoxious support process that you had to follow a certain protocol of a certain system and write your qusetion in a certain way. Soviet Union had less beaurocrasy than that. It took me another good 20 minutes to navigate around the support site to be sure as to what I had to do. In order to get my game's key fixed, among other things, I had to send them a photo of the receipt as well as a photo of the game CD key reference card that on that I had to write "with a permanent marker" my steam account name!!!!!!WTF????? I did not have a permanent marker. I do not own a digital camera and i dont own a scanner. Fortunately I own a mobile phone with a 3.2 mega pixel camera. I took the photos and trnasfered them to my pc. What would have happened if my phone did not have a camera. Should I have gone to a friends houseto do the process? Should I have gone to an INternet cafe to find a scanner? Should i have borrowed a digital camera? I bought a godamn game and all i wanted to do(and still do) was play, not apply for a tax refund to the IRS.

I got steam out of my ears when I had to go through this sh*t.

I did follow the whole procedure and I am now awaiting for their repsonse. It is now two hours after I bought the game and I still have not manged to play it, hell i have not even managed to install it.

Shame on Valve. I hate when companies find new ways to torture legit customers with DRM, with obnoxious copy protection systems and with ridiculous support systems. People hate these things and punish those companies. Under these circumstances I do not think less of people who download their games if this is the way companies are treating us. I would not do it due to collector reasons but that is another story. Companies should learn their lessons and stop torturing their customers. We are giving them our hard earned money and we deserve better!

The companies do not realize that throw tons of money to something that it is simply does not work. People will crack every system and anyone who is going to download it he/she will. If they get a good product in the market people will buy it. The people that were not gonna buy anyway might download but these people were never potential customers. You are then punishing your true customers by making their life difficult when they buy a legal copy. Down with all copy protection systems. Get a decent product on the market and it will succeed. Fill it with DRM and obnoxious copy protection systems and people will download it just for the heck of it. Hell if Valve has not fixed my problem until tomorrow I am downloading it even if I have have an original copy. The reason is that their copy protection system is "so good" that not even legit copies cannot play......You are ridiculous!