Valve Responds to Steam Territory Deactivations 258
An anonymous reader passed us a link to Shack News, which is reporting on official commentary from Doug Lombardi of Valve about the international Orange Box code problem we talked about yesterday. According to Lombardi, the folks who bought copies of the game from a Thai gaming store are pretty much out of luck. They'll need to buy a local copy to have a working version. That said, they should be able to replace the old code with a new one. "'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,' added Lombardi. 'Anyone having this problem should contact Steam Support to have the Thai key removed from their Steam account.'"
Re:Consumer rights (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Consumer rights (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Region Codes (Score:3, Informative)
The major reason to hate region locking is that we are in region 4 with the Kiwis and Central & South America. A lot of stuff will be produced for region 1 or 2 but will never be 're-coded' for region 4 because "it won't sell enough." (Although some of the smarter producers in the UK make their disks 2 and 4.) Thus, Australians have to get unlocked players to be able to see it, or they can learn Spanish and Portuguese. The ACCC sees this as an unfair restriction and has supposedly taken steps to fix it.
With all of this trouble, people wonder why we just download stuff.
To answer your original question, the ACCC [accc.gov.au] says this. [accc.gov.au]
Re:Language study (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Consumer rights (Score:3, Informative)
Though my (American) Orange Box says `Please see http://www.steampowered.com/agreement [steampowered.com] to view the SSA prior to purchase'. (SSA = Steam Subscriber Agreement). Excuse me while I go home and look this URL up, then come back to the store to buy it if the EULA meets with my agreement
Reading through that, I see nothing that lets them cut you off just because you bought your game from the `wrong' country. But then again, it is 5165 words (titled `Welcome to Steam' no less!) so maybe I missed something. The average reader's speed is 200-250 words per minute. Assuming 250 wpm, that's 21 minutes just reading their Steam agreement -- and this is complicated reading that people generally aren't familiar with, so they probably have to slow down (and maybe look some legal terms up) if they really want to understand it.
I guess the EULA would have to be on the web -- there's not enough room for the EULA, even if we use the entire outside of the box and every piece of paper inside. (Granted, there's only one piece of paper inside ...)
Of course, if you download your game from the Internet and use a Steam crack, they can't turn it off ...
It seems to me that Valve is trying to punish their paying customers because they didn't pay *enough*. And that sounds like a mistake on their part. If they want everybody to pay the same price, don't sell the game for less in other countries ...
Re:Consumer rights (Score:3, Informative)
They may hire people from foreign countries on H1B visas, but they actually come to the US, live here, earn, spend, and pay taxes.
Likewise, you're free to travel to Thailand, live there, and buy discounted games.
I just don't get all the hatred for Valve. With their development costs and retailer markups, they'd go bankrupt if they sold the Orange Box here for $15. No one in Thailand could afford it for $50. Does charging poor people less and rich people more make Valve some sort of monster?
Re:Problem with this is.. (Score:4, Informative)
The only restriction with the Orange Box is if you buy the physical box from Thailand or Russia, then the key can only be used in Thailand or Russia, it states this on the box itself. If you buy it on Steam it'll work any where in the world.
The reason for the Thai and Russian keys being restricted is because Valve sells them cheaper in those markets to help combat piracy. The online retailers who sold the boxes to places outside Thailand did not specify what was on the box to the people buying them.
RegardselFarto
Re:Low value version is region locked, that's OK (Score:3, Informative)
Re:remote control disablement = stealing (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect people are screaming bloody murder because they didn't read the article (Cue: You must be new here jokes).
Heres what it comes down to. Video games cost a shit ton of money to make. Generally games get sold around $50 in the US so it doesn't take forever for developers to recoup their costs. Hopefully we can agree that $50 is a reasonable price for a package of 3 kickass games and 2 you probably already played but can "give away" if you do already have them. After all, if you played episodes 1 and 2, chances are you wanna find out what happens in episode 3, and money doesn't grow on trees so valve has to charge you to continue development. Anyway, this point is minor but basically if you like their games, you should probably pay what they're asking instead of hunting around for cheap overseas copies.
Now to make back the money on the development, they had a few options. They could sell it for $50 everywhere, including countries that have significantly less disposable income and can't realistically afford to be spending their local equivalent of $50 on video games. They'll get all the people willing to spend $50 on it in the US, but they lose out on the people in poorer markets that either won't or can't spend more than $15 on it.
Or, they could sell it for $15 everywhere, so they sell a maximum number of copies but won't make as much money per copy. In fact they'd probably make less money overall, since there were certainly a large number of people willing to spend $50 on the "not-region-locked" US copy.
They took option #3. Sell it for a price the market will bear in all markets, but restrict the usage of the cheapest market copies to those markets. This means it gets sold for $50 in the US and anybody who pays the full price can play it anywhere, and it gets sold for $15 or whatever in the countries with lower market values for video games. You guys are screaming bloody murder over this for some reason. All this means is that in countries like Thailand people still get to buy entertainment, but they don't have to spend such a large portion of their income on it, and valve makes a little bit extra money with the long end of the tail. The boxes were (apparently) clearly labeled with a note that those cheap oversea copies will only work in their respective countries. So the problem lies with the middlemen failing to relay this note that the cheap thai copies will NOT work in the US.
If you continue to bitch about this and raise a stink, all that means is that next time, there will be no $15 overseas copy. The people screaming about getting locked out of a game advertised to not work in their territory will just have to pay $50 for the steam version or buy it in their local retail store for whatever price its going for. Or wait till they drop the price, which they always do.
I understand the problem with locking people out of a game they purchased. Except, in this case, the terms of the lockout were stated on the box's exterior and not jumbled up in legalese in a 500 page EULA. So, it was really the buyer's fault for going through unusual channels in the hopes of getting a "good deal" and instead getting a copy not intended for use outside of a certain region.
If you want game makers to continue making games that you like to play, pay the amount of money they're asking in the area you live in. By buying what practically works out to be "charity copies" of a game, you're giving them less money to develop episode 3. If you don't care about their games, obviously you don't have to pay them anything. But if you like them and want them to go on and continue adding maps to TF2 and Portal, you gotta fund that development somehow. Modern video game development, unlike modern music recording, is far too expensive to work on the "pay what you feel like" system. Pay what the game companies are asking for, or don't be disappointed when their game quality slides because they have less money to spend on talent.
Re:stupid comparison (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, owning Soviet based aircraft is legal as well, you just can't import it, just like you said, because of it's classification as a weapon. The ATF doesn't like it. If someone was able to produce a copy of the MiG from the ground up in the US then it would be perfectly legal to own and fly it under the Experimental Aircraft category.
Bill