Valve: Steam game deactivations due to territory violations

For those of us who purchased Valve Corporation‘s cuboid of FPS goodness, The Orange Box, out of town and found their games deactivated by Steam, fret not.

The company that gave us Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal have recently released a statement about this, explaining that the deactivations themselves are part of Steam’s programming, and that users should purchase a legal copy of The Orange Box in their local stores (instead of buying outside the country to save a buck or two).

But why is Steam deactivating legally-bought games (even if they’re from out of town)? Territory violation, that’s why. Valve’s own Doug Lombardi explains:

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.

Well, at least we know that Steam works in that aspect. What should the users who found themselves locked out of their games do, then? Doug Lombardi suggests buying a legitimate copy of The Orange Box from their local store. Problem fixed, then?

Not quite. It seems that there are a few users who have already done this, and found themselves still unable to play, having trouble removing the illegitimate product key from their old accounts. Doug Lombardi responds to this by directing Steam users who are having this problem to contact Steam Support for the exact procedures on how to remove said key.

For those of us who purchased Valve Corporation‘s cuboid of FPS goodness, The Orange Box, out of town and found their games deactivated by Steam, fret not.

The company that gave us Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal have recently released a statement about this, explaining that the deactivations themselves are part of Steam’s programming, and that users should purchase a legal copy of The Orange Box in their local stores (instead of buying outside the country to save a buck or two).

But why is Steam deactivating legally-bought games (even if they’re from out of town)? Territory violation, that’s why. Valve’s own Doug Lombardi explains:

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.

Well, at least we know that Steam works in that aspect. What should the users who found themselves locked out of their games do, then? Doug Lombardi suggests buying a legitimate copy of The Orange Box from their local store. Problem fixed, then?

Not quite. It seems that there are a few users who have already done this, and found themselves still unable to play, having trouble removing the illegitimate product key from their old accounts. Doug Lombardi responds to this by directing Steam users who are having this problem to contact Steam Support for the exact procedures on how to remove said key.