The installation of HL2 was a real pain in the ass!! It has to use the internet to finish the installation which took a really long time. After some initial problems trying to install HL2, it took me about 1,5 hours to install the game! The verifiation or whatever it was that required internet itself (perhaps certain things like updates were downloaded) took about 30 minutes. First game in a long time I had such trouble to install and taking ages in the process itself. It was however an enjoyable game, except for the racing levels which were kind of a drag. But the more you get to the end the better it gets.

Quote 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.
The shop (Dynabyte) I usually buy my games at has a "if the game has a cdkey and the gamepackage is opened (the plastic seal is removed), then it cannot be returned for money back nor exchanged for another product of the same value or more" policy. I once bought a game I wasn't very satisfied with and couldn't return it for another game because of it. The reason given being piracy.