AI War 6.0 and Ancient Shadows Expansion Materialize on Steam

[keith.lamothe]

Will this be released on 'GameStop' now?

Sometime next week, probably.  We were aiming at having it there on Friday too but the timing didn't work out.

I have the Alien bundle on steam, but I "accidentally" bought Ancient Shadow on Gamersgate.

Will I be able to redeem it on steam?

Not yet, and we can't guarantee it, but we've asked Valve to recognize those keys.  Normally the process takes a couple weeks, but with AVWW took several months, so I don't want to get your hopes up

But I do have one question for everyone really eager to get their AS key registered in steam: why, exactly?  You do know that you can just plug your AS key into your steam copy (in the game, not in steam) and it will work fine, right?  Otherwise, you couldn't have used your steam copy to beta AS at all   And you get steam voice chat and whatnot in the game because your AIW base-game copy is from steam, etc.  About the only things I can think of that you're missing are:

1) Being able to download/redownload the AS expansion through steam.
2) Being able to ask steam what your AS key is and have it tell you.

I'm sure there are other things, but what are they?

Either way, we're doing our best to get the beta (and generally-bought-elsewhere) keys to register in steam, I was just curious about the above question.

[Mánagarmr]

One word, Keith: OCD

[keith.lamothe]

One word, Keith: OCD

But that's three!

[Mánagarmr]

One word, Keith: OCD

But that's three!

SSH!

[madcow]

Delicious steam achievements!

On a serious note, it's probably that Valve's headcrabs have infiltrated all our minds and force us to put all our games through steam. It's step two in their master plan of world domination. Step one obviously being the implanting of said headcrabs to begin with.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I want to add a little to your post about registering the key as well. When I play the game on someone else's computer (I had to back when my computer crashed every other minute) I just downloaded the demo and registered the keys. Then, everything just worked as intended. So, you can even just have the demo on steam with the overlay and all and still get all of the features of the game. Although, I don't know if you have to install all of the expansions or not manually.

@madcow: Are gonomes canon, and does Valve want an army of them?

[madcow]

I'm not sure if they're canon or not, but I'll also say they're a step up from many internet trolls - which they have plenty of. So yes, if nothing else than to use that army to fight off the trolls.

[Volatar]

I like being able to download the whole game through Steam at once and then not have to go through my folders for my /AI War/keys.txt file. That really is about it.

[prot0mega]

Will this be released on 'GameStop' now?

Sometime next week, probably.  We were aiming at having it there on Friday too but the timing didn't work out.

I have the Alien bundle on steam, but I "accidentally" bought Ancient Shadow on Gamersgate.

Will I be able to redeem it on steam?

Not yet, and we can't guarantee it, but we've asked Valve to recognize those keys.  Normally the process takes a couple weeks, but with AVWW took several months, so I don't want to get your hopes up

But I do have one question for everyone really eager to get their AS key registered in steam: why, exactly?  You do know that you can just plug your AS key into your steam copy (in the game, not in steam) and it will work fine, right?  Otherwise, you couldn't have used your steam copy to beta AS at all   And you get steam voice chat and whatnot in the game because your AIW base-game copy is from steam, etc.  About the only things I can think of that you're missing are:

1) Being able to download/redownload the AS expansion through steam.
2) Being able to ask steam what your AS key is and have it tell you.

I'm sure there are other things, but what are they?

Either way, we're doing our best to get the beta (and generally-bought-elsewhere) keys to register in steam, I was just curious about the above question.

Sorry, I didn't know they are compatible. Thank you for clarifying that.
Also steam didn't download the expansion patch for me, so the in game license manager only said "Ancient Shadow Expansion not installed" and didn't have the clickable space for me to enter the key. But after I installed the patch from gamersgate, I can finally activate my key in the license manager.
Thank you for the quick reply.

[keith.lamothe]

Thank you for the quick reply.

Sure, and welcome to the forums   Let us know if you need anything else.

[fishy]

But I do have one question for everyone really eager to get their AS key registered in steam: why, exactly?  You do know that you can just plug your AS key into your steam copy (in the game, not in steam) and it will work fine, right?  Otherwise, you couldn't have used your steam copy to beta AS at all   And you get steam voice chat and whatnot in the game because your AIW base-game copy is from steam, etc.  About the only things I can think of that you're missing are:

1) Being able to download/redownload the AS expansion through steam.
2) Being able to ask steam what your AS key is and have it tell you.

I'm sure there are other things, but what are they?

Steam has the majority of my games and is an easy unified installer. I cant trust as well if a developer or publisher went under that I would be able to still download and play their game. (Not saying this in your case, just saying.) It's also a good way to recommend your games/expansions; soon as it shows up on my game list I can write a recommendation which goes out to all my friends. It also shows my friends how many hours I have put into this game and that is great advertisement in itself.

Thanks for the great expansion.

[Kahuna]

Steam has the majority of my games and is an easy unified installer. I cant trust as well if a developer or publisher went under that I would be able to still download and play their game. (Not saying this in your case, just saying.) It's also a good way to recommend your games/expansions; soon as it shows up on my game list I can write a recommendation which goes out to all my friends. It also shows my friends how many hours I have put into this game and that is great advertisement in itself.

Thanks for the great expansion.

Exactly what I was going to say! You stole my tongue!

[Motoki]

I hope so.

Part of the reason I was a little miffed was all my keys except the spire expansion was already claimed by random key gens when I finally tried to claim it on Steam.

I was hoping I could avoid that problem by claiming my own key on day 1, but since it is not recognized, it is now my responsibility to check the key frequently to ensure my key is not claimed by pirates.

The above: why I hate Steam.

I avoid it whenever possible. In the case of AI war, I have my keys stored somewhere utterly unhackable (physically written down) and redownload from the Arcen site if there are problems.

If you don't like Steam as a service or company or whatever that's totally fine, but hating them because some pirates using a random number generator nabbed a key by chance of a legitimate owner to register it on Steam? How is that Steam's fault?

In any case, if you have no intention to ever play the game on Steam then it doesn't really affect you at all. Those pirates just want the key to redeem it on Steam. It's not like they are going to use it for some purpose to go back to Arcen with it and anyway they don't have a proof of purchase. If you aren't going to ever play the game on Steam or register it there you will never know if someone nabbed your key there or not and it doesn't matter.

Also your key isn't safer because you wrote it down. Again, they are getting these through a random generator so they could still potentially get your key. However, this shouldn't impact you in any way as the legitimate owner unless you want to register that key on Steam.

Arcen could potentially get around this whole thing by not having Valve register their existing keys on Steam retroactively and just generating a new Steam key themselves in Valve's format for existing owners on request, but that's less convenient for the owners of the game and potentially a lot of manual service requests to respond to for them.

*Edited to add: I want to emphasize that this sort of thing doesn't happen to everyone. I bought the Alien pack on Gamersgate a while back with the base and all the expansions minus Ancient Shadows. All 4 keys registered on Steam for me without a hitch.

It's very troubling when it does happen but it's certainly not 100% of the time. That being said, any existing owners who even remotely care about having the game on Steam are best advised to register their keys ASAP once they go live on Steam just to be on the safe side.

[zespri]

If you don't like Steam as a service or company or whatever that's totally fine, but hating them because some pirates using a random number generator nabbed a key by chance of a legitimate owner to register it on Steam? How is that Steam's fault?

Actually, it's Arcen fault. The keygen for their games is trivial to write, that would be totally fine with me, if not this little steam problem. While I understand all the upsides of their decision, the downside is that I am as a customer lost an opportunity to register my key on steam, because a pirate did it faster than me. And I'm not the only one, I believe. What is worse in this situation, if you are not fast enough no email to customer support can remedy. Arcen will tell you, we are sorry, please write to Steam support, and Steam support will tell you that you are out of luck even though you have a proof of purchase and what not if you have not purchased the game just recently.

Steam support does not give a reason why time matters to them, but if I were to guess, their line of thinking may be like this: if you just bought the game and someone registered your code, you are extremely unlucky and they are happy to help. On the other hand if enough time has passed, then, given the triviality of the keygenning there is absolutely no surprise, that your key got regestired, so they'd wash their hands. I consider this as a hint to Arcen, that there is something that they could improve. However in this case this is unlikely, as this topic has been brought up zillion of times, and Arcen position on this is quite clear.

In this respect Shadow (Din's Curse/Drox Op/etc author) compares more favourably, since he does steam key generation himself. So if anyone who purchased his game want a steam, he will give you one usually within 24 hours, and you don't have to fear that this key won't be accepted by Steam.

No-DRM banner is good. However no desire to fix resulting issue above doesn't sit well with me.

I've been following Arcen for quite a long time, and I can call myself a loyal customer, I'm not a hater. So I'm willing to forgive them this one small thing, given that they got so many other darn things right, but I don't think I'll ever like this.

[Wingflier]

Why is the "accidentally" in quotations lol?