Whoa, okay. Let's back up here:
1. Not remotely every game from every developer registers on Steam.
Let's not set up straw men. Nobody said that.
I'm not a fan of straw men either. I was responding to the strange statement:
Actually, every developer does this.
I must be really misunderstanding what you meant. Which is, naturally, entirely possible in this format.
However, yours does, and you supported it for this expansion just this past winter. Now you don't? If you don't see that as changing your policy when every other product you have ever released supports it, when you openly supported for this product we are talking about today and now suddenly don't (I provided a link showing this), I don't know what to say. Must be really good coffee.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding this, just from the wording. If you provided a link, I missed it. In terms of us "supporting it for this expansion just this past winter," I'm not sure what you mean in terms of that. We never provided the ability for this to register on Steam if that's what you mean. If you mean that we said we hoped it would happen, absolutely. If you mean that we said we expected it to happen, absolutely. In fact, I bugged Valve about this no less than three times, and possibly five, over a span of months. They said yes each time, and yet the keys don't register. There's a limit to how long I can ask them the same thing before I royally piss them off. It's not that I'm timid and haven't breached the super-sensitive topic with them.
I certainly won't be using your store anymore, as you selectively support it.
That is utter rubbish that we selectively, but you're welcome not to use the store. I believe what we generally say on our site is "please use your distributor of choice." We abide by everything we promise on our store and elsewhere, and to say that we're in breach of something we never promised is rather misleading.
all of your early adopters and direct store purchasers should be aware that whatever key they get may not be supported on steam.
Yes, that we agree on. We've always been super clear on that point. The basic message we've always had is: "We hope that we can provide this, but we provide no guarantees as it's out of our hands as Steam has to do it. All of our prior products supported it, so we expect this one to register too, at some point." That's not an exact quote, but that's more or less what we have always said. In no instance have I ever said "Steam keys definitely coming next week!" or "Steam keys available at launch!" or anything of the sort.
The fact is, I've never had so much trouble getting Valve to register keys as I have with this expansion. In the past I would ask once, and they would do it. With Valley 1 I think it was, I had to ask several times and then finally it worked. Maybe it was the expansion prior to this one, I don't recall for sure. But it took a long time and was suddenly a hassle, whichever product it was. Then with this one I asked them a record number of times, and no dice.
I'm not the sort to pass the buck off when I can help it, but I hope you can see that I'm not the one calling the shots here. Yes I could ask them yet another time to do it. They will probably say yes. And then they may or may not actually do it, given that they've said yes every other time up until now, too. Frankly I have had to ask them for a lot of things lately, though, and I prefer not to become a "problem developer" in their minds.
