Originally Posted by TosaInu
That's very nasty Navaros. I got about the same with a Novalogic game, I don't recall anymore which solution support had, but I could change my copy with another one in shop after I explained.
The tricky part for Steam is: who to believe? You and I know that we are legal customers, but how should Steam check that? You could think about supplying yet another ID code with the copy in case a warez kid generated your CD-key (and such an approach is used by some software), but that's not a real solution either when some script can generate such codes as well.
Shop owners got a serious problem as well: how to check a customer didn't burn a copy and returns his legal copy?
Using warez isn't just hurting the software industry, it's hurting fair customers as well.
I also have games which didn't require any sort of code at all, almost decent games too.
I'm starting to think (long time already), that software protection is a lost battle anyway. It won't fight warez, illegal copies of Windows XP were available for $1 in the Far East before Microsoft shipped it. But it definately hurts, frustrates and disappoints legal customers. Steam is one example, the nosy registry stuff for games is another.