Replying to Half Life 2/Steam WTF?

K I bought this game from play.Com for £7 not to much but I was still looking forward to playing it.

It arrived a week later and then the installation verification told me that the serial code in my case was

already in use by another user!  Therefore I cant activate my product.

Why cant I just buy a game install and play? ... 

Steam is a load of ****..

I'm done with Steam. That thing is just too much hassle.

No more Valve Games for me.  I'm not buying anymore of their games that have Steam as the gatekeeper.

Well I have a different problem, When I go to update a game(because it says so) then what really annoys me is that you have to update the other games as well.(the games who needs them) and I have a desktop which is a big computer(not laptop) and I have to move it everytime just to connect it to the internet which I have to update something to play it and which can get annoying. The updates sucks because it could ruin your entertainment and the updates takes lots of space from your computer and can take alot of gigabytes (GB) from your internet. It took about 2GB of my internet once.

I agree with the person who post this, steam is just a few people who just thinks about themselves and about their money. Man *sight* I would be aweseome if they had the old ways of purchasing pc games offline at shops.

But still something must be done, we could have a poll and have a vote and the one with the most votes wins over the debate like a campaign and I comes from South africa if anyone asks if I am a american.

Games where the internet is compulary are pushing people away from PC games to the fools gold of consoles which is sad to see.I live in the sticks away from any towns and can't even get internet at home, yet I have a beast of a PC which as a result won't play steam games.It's too late now but when steam started we all should've boycotted it, unfortunately people were too desperate to play and have left those without broadband out on the street. Valve is rubbing its hands together and laughing, there are otherways to combat piracy.P.S. Check internet explorer. Are you "working offline"? for some reason that can also make steam think its offline.

-reply by Simeon

 Killer008r, what are you even talking about, you don't need to disconnect anything. Once you have connected to the service, you can then go into offline mode. The problem is that you must first connect, which is absurd for a single player game. I don't care if there are people pirating games, the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer for it and Steam is the only one that forces you to go online before you can play any games. This gives them unlimited power and control over YOUR game. They can ban you from ever playing your game again even if you already paid for it

You must first connect to their service online BEFORE you can then go into "offline mode." If you have no internet connection then you cannot play ANY Steam games, even single player ones. Why? Because Steam is run by CROOKS and they run their service like a MALWARE group.

I ran into a similar problem, I no longer had an internet connection because I couldn't afford it, and so I could no longer play any games through Steam, not even single player games. I contacted support and they basically told me to go get bent. My advice to people is simply to never buy games through Steam because of their business practices.

If you anger them or do anything to cause them to disable your Steam account, you will NEVER AGAIN be able to play any of the games you ALREADY PAID FOR. They can BAN you from playing your own games LOL doesn't that sound nice? 

*** I downloaded steam but when I click on it, it says that its not connected to internet how the hell am I suposed to get on to it, I already have a steam account and I have internet *** Please HELP ME plus my mom said shell get gmod and the orange box for me but how can I play it if I cant get on to steam!VERY ANGRY