There are reasons to like Valve Software’s Steam service. It makes buying and delivering new software easy. It lets you find friends you want to play with. And I’m sure a lot of other good things as well.

However, I don’t like Steam. I don’t like Steam to the point where I no longer want my Steam account.

My major criticism of Steam harks back to the release of Half Life 2. I bought the game using a credit card from a reputable high street store. In fact, I still have the original game box, DVD and receipt. The only problem is, Valve thinks I’m a pirate. And the only way to prove I’m not a pirate, that I bought my game legitimately, is to let Valve’s Steam software rummage around on my hard drive to ‘verify’ and ‘enable’ my game.

I know nothing will ever be done to change this, far too many people have acquiesced and Steam is far too ingrained amongst gamers to ever be changed to remove the automatic assumption that a person who buys a Valve game is not a pirate. Which is why I have chosen to never buy or play a game that uses Steam.

However, this does leave me in the position of still having a Steam account, which I did use to ‘verify’ and ‘enable’ the copy of Half Life 2 I bought on my credit card from a reputable high street store. I had to prove to Valve I wasn’t a pirate if I wanted to play their game.

Once I had finished with the game, I contacted Valve to have my account deleted, as I had no wish for them to retain any of my details, including my email address, and I had no use for the Steam account any longer.

One of the responses I got was frankly ludicrous:

As steam is a free product, you cannot cancel the account. You can disable the account by uninstalling
it.

What has being a free product got to do with cancelling an account?

It took several emails, and an assumption on the part of Steam’s support staff that I was trying to reset CounterStrike CD keys (which tells me they didn’t check my Steam account, which would have shown that I did not have any CounterStrike CD keys associated with the account.

I finally received the following email on September 24, 2004, after cc’ing Gabe Newell into the discussion - it says a lot when you have to include the company CEO in a support query to actually have your request read and dealt with:

Dear Tom, per your multiple requests I am disabling your Steam account efective imediatelly, remember that
this will not allow you to receive any emails from Steam including account/password recovery emails or have
access to your account.

If you have any more questions feel free to contact Steam Support.

The other day I saw my copy of Half Life 2 (which I can no longer play, as I’ve had to re-install my Windows OS several times) and thought I’d check out my Steam account to see if Valve had actually disabled it as I requested (something I really should have done at the time).

Of course, the first thing that happened was I was able to log straight into the account that Valve claimed had been disabled.

So I read through the Valve and Steam website again, and tried contacting Valve through the usual channels. I emailed SteamSupport (which timed out), and I emailed Privacy. Interestingly, the email given in the Privacy Policy as a contact point if you have concerns over privacy and the way your data is handled results in this auto-response:

Thank you for contacting Valve. This email address is monitored, however due to the volume of email we
get daily, you may not necessarily get a direct response.

So, if I have a concern over privacy, they may check the email inbox eventually?

I guess I need to go back to SteamSupport and create a new account just to have the old account disabled? After all, despite assurances from Valve that the account had been disabled, it appears that in reality it has been active and useable for more than two years.

And given Valve’s disinterest in actually dealing with privacy issues, what recourse do I have if the account is used fraudulently? From what I have been able to discover, I have no resource at all - I can’t even take the basic step of protecting my own data by requesting the account be disabled so that no-one, not even me, can use it. And should I actually want my details removed - well, that’s just not possible - after all, it’s a free service…

Technorati Tags: Valve, Steam, Half Life 2, Privacy, Identity Management