Saturday, November 17, 2007

Living in Hong Kong and in a "Steam" hell

Come on Valve, get your acts together in the vast Asian market:


Original article can be found at: http://tokyoahead.com/main/article.php/ecommercehell


Sunday, November 11 2007 @ 03:28 PM Contributed by: Oliver Views: 71

If you live outside Europe, the Americas and Japan, you are E-commercially non-existent to many international corporations. The market seems too small for many companies. Nintendo for example is smart enough to region-code their Wii console, but if you want to have one in Hong Kong, you need to buy grey imports from the USA, with the wrong voltage and without the localized content that citizens of other countries get. But surely you can buy the products and use them. If you want to buy games over Valve's Steam platform it gets a "bit" more difficult. They published famous and great games such as Counter Strike, Half-life and Portal over this online-platform. But they do not seem to like you - and your money neither for that matter.

Step 1: Try to buy - successful start, failure at last.So if you are trying to buy something with them over credit card or paypal, they give you success messages at the beginning, let you enter all your data and click "Purchase" with the verified data. Same for Paypal, you log in, process the payment and then paypal sends you back to the Steam-screen where you confirm the final buy. But then, Steam cancels the whole thing with a message that the process was canceled by paypal because of an authorization failure!

Step 2: Try again and again, and get the boot.But after trying several credit cards and paypal, you are certain that the problem is with Steam, not your credit cards. However, they try to send you back to the credit company to fix a problem they caused. And to make it even more obscure, the Steam client bans you from payment for 24 hrs if you try for more than 3 times with a credit card with a message that the server is down and you should try later...

Step 3: Ask for help, and don't get any.So you write a support case on the Steam support website and ask what is going on. Then, you get a reply asking to send your credit card info again, this time via email or the support page, and the first time a clear message that you got blocked by Steam - not by Paypal.

Step 4: Tell them that you want to spend money, not take it.So of course sending all the info again is not the most direct thing to do since you tried it all already several times, and what should you send with paypal info anyhow? Your account password? So what do you do? You write back that this is ridiculous and that you feel lied at by Steam because of the various misleading error messages..

Step 5: Get a permission to spend money - once only please!So they write you back that they unblock your account. Now why did they need your credit card information again at first but not after you complain about it? Still your account is unblocked.

Step 6: Repeat. Beware. In case you want to buy another game with Steam, the whole procedure starts from scratch. So you might better warn them beforehand if you want to buy a game, so they can unblock your account in time. And that is what they recommend, too. They might tell you that they unlock your account when you ask for the first time, but they do not tell you until you explicitly ask for it that they unlock it each time for only one transaction, but never clear your account form beeing a criminal suspect despite repeated purchases:But wait... isn't that the same as going downtown and buying the game in a box? Aren't you using the online purchasing to be able to get the game anytime, any day, from your home? Well not if you are living in Hong Kong, you are quicker going downtown, even if the traffic & pollution is hell... its not as hot a hell as with Steam.Luckily, other companies such as Electronic Arts are not as unwilling to earn money. They have an extra page for Hong Kong, a large showroom in the city and allow you to order online - without giving you the impression