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." "In this case, a Thai website was selling retail box product keys for Thailand to people outside of Thailand. "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," said Lombardi.
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Talking with Shacknews, Valve's Doug Lombardi now says that the Steam software is merely carrying out this function by design. Original Story (published Oct 26): Some consumers who purchased Valve's Orange Box from vendors located outside of their home country-mainly in an attempt to save on cheaper products-have recently reported that their otherwise legally-obtained games have since been deactivated by Valve's Steam software for territory violation. Especially for the slice of games that fall into that category that have no boxed copy US release at all.
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That being said, sometimes even the case that a physical UK PC release+Royal Mail to the USA is cheaper than what you would pay for if you bought the game from a retailer in the USA, and I have no qualms about importing the game in that situation. That's just my own personal ethics though, everyone has to set their own standard. My personal take on this is that, as someone with a long-term interest in seeing the hobby and platform grow, I don't buy CD Keys lke this online and I do not import physical copies from regions where I know they are heavily discounted due to market immaturity. The first is one of pure globalization and reimportation of goods-if I, as a consumer, can find a good cheaper overseas, why shouldn't I buy it directly from there? The other is the viewpoint that local sales in your region are more profitable and if you buy the game in your own country the creators of the game are going to see more royalties/proceeds than if you buy the CD KEY from overseas that is marked up 100% (and is still super cheap). Honestly, there are two sort of ethical stances you can take on this. The catch now is that these versions are useful for anyone around the world, as the keys are not locked to a region, and they essentially "unlock" the game for people in places where the game sells for me. PC Games are cheaper in Poland and Thailand, for example, because that's what the local economy will support. I'd much rather buy keys like this since it would let me buy easily 2 to 3 times as many PC games due to the cheap prices, but I also don't want to be a pirate :lol Anyone have any thoughts?Īll of these web sites are operated in regions where the product pricing is lower than the the US pricing due to local market factors. Would buying these CD Keys, rather than going to store and paying $49 for the new game, be considered piracy/illegal? Considering you would have to acquire the game by some other means since the websites do not give you the game. Now I know these websites have probably been around for a while but I had no idea, so it's new news to me. That got me wondering though, so i searched around and found many websites that sold CD Keys to all the recent games for anywhere from $15-25USD. So of course I went ahead and bought them, entered the keys into steam, and now I am enjoying both games immensly (L4D Rocks!) Valve doesn't seem to mind, the only action i have heard of them taking was that they disabled the games for people that bought their games from Thailand for cheaper, but no accounts were banned. Recently in the official Steam thread, someone posted a link to a polish website that was selling Orange box CD Keys for $10 and L4D CD Keys for $15.
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