Steam keys

[blkmage]

Steam seems to of run out of keys and has given no response for about 2 days now. Any way to request one from Arcen?

[qwertas]

Same thing is happening to me.  Got the game during the sale, greeted with "Failed to contact key server" for the past two days. 

[keith.lamothe]

Ack, sorry to hear that's happening.  Do you know for sure that it's a lack of keys on their end?  Either way, I've let Chris (our CEO and generally-handles-distributor-relations person... and does just about everything else, now that I think about it) know so he can follow up with Valve and figure out what to do here.

We sent them more keys not very long ago, and while sales were pretty good this last week I didn't think they were that good

[Moorwin]

The error message that people get (including myself), is as follows: Failed to contact key server. There is a specific support page on the steam support site that deals with the issue, and here is why we  think the error message is caused by a lack of keys:

"If the game is a recent release, or was purchased during a sale
While we do our best to anticipate demand from our users, occasionally we may run out of keys to provide for your purchase. When we are out of keys, this error will appear. You will be issued a key as soon as we have been given more by the game's publisher."

Source: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2204-OPGC-4862

This has happened to me before, for example when Mount and Blade went on sale. It really pisses me off that Valve can't even bother to inform people that a specific product is not available. I also think that it is illegal not to, unless they have some nifty paragraph in their ToS.

Anyway, it's good to hear that someone somewhere with some amount of influence on the matter at least knows about the problem, Valve isn't exactly known for fixing these problems swiftly.

[keith.lamothe]

In Valve's defense, I will say that they usually ask us for more keys before any major sale.  They are at least somewhat proactive on the issue.

I do agree on "if you don't have a key, don't say it's for sale", though.  It would have hurt us if they'd just stopped letting people buy the game when they ran out of keys, but it doesn't sit right with me that someone could pay money while having every reason to expect that the product would be immediately available (it doesn't say "preorder" or "backorder", after all), and then not get something in return until some indefinite time in the future.

So I wish they'd handle that differently.  At least more transparently.  But overall I'm very happy with steam both as a customer and as a developer.  Nothing's perfect, though, for sure.

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience, hopefully Chris will be around at some point today; its too bad this happened right as we entered the weekend or we'd probably have been able to address this (in some fashion) already.

[Moorwin]

In Valve's defense, I will say that they usually ask us for more keys before any major sale.  They are at least somewhat proactive on the issue.

I do agree on "if you don't have a key, don't say it's for sale", though.  It would have hurt us if they'd just stopped letting people buy the game when they ran out of keys, but it doesn't sit right with me that someone could pay money while having every reason to expect that the product would be immediately available (it doesn't say "preorder" or "backorder", after all), and then not get something in return until some indefinite time in the future.

So I wish they'd handle that differently.  At least more transparently.  But overall I'm very happy with steam both as a customer and as a developer.  Nothing's perfect, though, for sure.

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience, hopefully Chris will be around at some point today; its too bad this happened right as we entered the weekend or we'd probably have been able to address this (in some fashion) already.

Don't get me wrong, I am not in any way blaming anyone at Arcen for this.

I don't think they should've stopped people from buying the game, but rather, as you implied, have a notice saying something along the lines of "temporarily unavailable". I would still have bought it, since the sale made the game about as expensive as a second rate hamburger (while still being a lot more appetizing), but I wouldn't have been infuriated when I had to wait to play it. It's even more frustrating since it has happened before.

For the most part, steam works flawlessly (which is why I have over 90 games on it). However, when I do run into trouble, I find the customer support to be extremely slow, sometimes taking as much as a week to respond on a support ticket. Here it was a matter of hours. I know that steam support gets a ton of support requests, but it should be staffed accordingly. Also, the steam sales almost always happen during weekends, which is why these problems are prone to be delayed further than my patience allows.

Anyhow, I thank you for the quick response regarding this and hope to be playing your game soon!

[dlat]

I'm affected too. Quite frustrating. ;(

[keith.lamothe]

I don't think they should've stopped people from buying the game, but rather, as you implied, have a notice saying something along the lines of "temporarily unavailable".

That would be preferable, yes.  I think in general the root problem is that they don't actually know at the time you're looking at the store page for the game whether there will be keys available when you buy it.  This is because (iirc) they don't actually "issue" a key until you click the CD Key link on the library page for the game, or try to install/run it so that it pops up the keys.

I think that's part of the problem: it should immediately issue the keys when processing your purchase of the game.  If it fails in the process of doing so, that would be an excellent time to inform you of which products are temporarily unavailable and ask you to confirm or cancel.

But I'm just armchair platform-engineering here

Anyhow, I thank you for the quick response regarding this and hope to be playing your game soon!

I hope so too

[x4000]

Generally speaking they request large batches of more keys before we ever hit the point of running out; I'll shoot them an email right now and see what's up, but it may be until Monday before I hear back from them.  I don't have any direct visibility into their keys system, unfortunately; it could actually be a technical issue on their end instead.

[Eternaly_Lost]

Half of me can understand why they/you do it that way, but the other half of me looks at the fact that you can run out of a digital product that you sell and need to wait to 'restock' and a little part of me dies with that.

It just seems rather stupid to me that a digital product can be out of stock. Truely a WTF, and I am sure that I saw a screenshot of that on thedailywtf.com

[Aklyon]

Its less run out to me and more 'How many keys do you make before you think you've made too many?' People underestimate, and then its 'out of stock' while they fix their miscount (or it was much more popular than expected and they weren't even close).

[Hearteater]

The issue here is Arcen is making the keys, because they allow more than one distributor to sell there games.  If it was only Steam that sold them, they could let Steam generate them.  But since they need to make sure Steam and another store don't duplicate keys, Arcen needs to be the sole source of keys.  The total number of keys is also finite, so Arcen can't just make a billion keys for each distributor.  They don't even want to give out all the keys because what if they did and Steam ran out but every other distributor had 90% of their keys left?  Tough luck for people who want to buy from Steam.

[x4000]

Okay, the new keys have been imported by Valve and you should be all set. Please let us know if you see the issue any more. Thanks!



The issue is also import time. Valve doesn't want to spend the time to import a billion keys for a game that sells 5k copies either. Of course, AI War has sold more than 200k copies by now, but the principle is the same. This isn't limited to steam either -- most online downloadable software that you can buy works this way, although some have a key generator program that they automatically call in order to generate more keys.

[Moorwin]

Problem solved at my end for both base game and expansions. Thanks a bunch!

[x4000]

Awesome, glad we could help!