from ggmania
 
Valve Deactivating Gamers Who Bought Orange Box

According to Consumerist, there are quite a few customers are finding their "Orange Box" games have been deactivated by Valve because they bought them from a seller that wasn't authorized to do business with US customers. Here's a thread of irritated Valve customers like Todd who are trying to get refunds from their international vendors (with varying levels of success.)
This complaint is about Valve, a PC video game company which makes games like Half-Life 2. This effects many thousands of customers. They recently released a product called the \"Orange Box\", which is a bunch of games. All their products are activated online via unique serial numbers through the Steam service. Many of us bought the product (and hence, the serial numbers) legitimately online via well known international game stores, as they sell them significantly cheaper than American stores.

We were able to activate the products without a problem. One week later, Valve, via the Steam program, inactivated all Orange Box games (after they had already been active for some time), stating that they are in the \"incorrect territory.\" There was no warning or anything, just completely inactivated. The thread that was started on www.valve.com has been removed by the operators there. I think this is absolutely reprehensible customer care. We paid for our products, and they just go and remove it without warning from our computers. Thanks -Todd  
bummer!!
 
 
 
 

Valve is an evil corporation now, after raking in so much with HL, even before it made a deal with the Devil that is EA.  I do hope they turn around.

i sence the good in EA ........ not much tho
they will turn to the dark side ....no wait they are there already immmmmmmmmmmm
wait young grasshopper you are evil your posts are 666

 
 
I almost didn't finish reading that, but then I saw you said they are on the dark side. I was about to start a rant about how bad they are . Rushing games out before they're ready for release (Hellgate: London anyone?) Putting snooping privilliages in their EULA so they can gather information about your computer with no limit to what they can and cannot search for both them and their "third parties". Pfft, lame.

i hear ya
 
ps all they have to do to make it kewl is have it as a option, not as a" I AGREE"....... OR YOU CAN NOT INSTALL THE GAME what the hell is that

Exactly. There are usually ways around it though... Like using a packet sniffer to see what is snooping and your computer and where it is going to  . Then we just make a quick trip to the host file and resolve that IP or web address to 127.0.0.1 and they're snooping as just been pwned.