While our “defeat the admin” TF2 event was a full success and I believe that we all had a lot of fun, the chat party – unfortunaly – was an uncontrollable chaos.

The Steam Group Chat proved suitable of smaller amounts of users, but absolutely not for several hundred people with many of them spamming nonsense or virus links.

The chats programming seems to be flawed and inefficient too, seeing that it takes up to 50% CPU, increasing with the number of people and crashing whole Steam otherwhiles.

The result is, that future Chat Events will be held on our IRC Channel (#steamunpowered) on Quakenet only, which is guarded by Le_Chuck, our one-legged pirate Anti-Spam Bot, to provide a reasonable platform to discuss, even with larger amounts of people. ;)

The Steam Group Chat will be locked at that time.

For those of you without an IRC Client such as mIRC, joining our channel is as easy as going to: http://webchat.quakenet.org/ and entering your Name.

Of course you are welcome to join and idle anytime. :)
Other than the Steam Chat, there are usually Admins around at all times.

All details again:
==========================
Steam Unpowered IRC Channel:
Server: irc.quakenet.org
Channel: #steamunpowered
http://webchat.quakenet.org/
==========================

You can discuss alternative shops here.

We will mention if any of the listed shops contain DRM (Digital Restriction Management) games, regional locked games or regional shops. SSL security is also another important feature to protect customer’s personal information so that will be mentioned as well.

NEW SHOPS – untested!

1. Direct Game Keys [untested!]
2. CD Key Heaved [untested!]

Approved List

1. Good Old Games
2. Direct2Drive [contains DRM and regional locked games]
3. Impulse [contains DRM and regional locked games]
4. Gamestop [US only and contains DRM games]
5. Gamesplanet [contains DRM games]
6. GameTap [US only]
7. Metaboli (UK, DE, FR, IT) [contains DRM games]
8. GamersGate [no SSL and regional locked games]
9. GAME.co.uk [contains DRM games]
10. OnlineKeyStore
11. cdkeyshop [no SSL and DRM games]

Disapproved List

1. Steam [DRM and regional locked games, regional shops that differ up to 40% from each other in many cases]
2. EA Store [DRM and regional locked games, regional shops that differ greatly from each other in many cases]
3. Amazon [DRM games and regional shops that differ greatly from each other in many cases]
4. G2Play.net [Although it used to work great, people these days claim their keys don't work in several cases, some keys are the cut versions of games on Steam and some sources even claim that their keys are stolen - site removed from the approved list.]
5. CDkey-Game.com [no SSL] – do not buy from them, read this

Updates
10/07/09 – Removed G2Play.net from the approved shops list, and CDkey-Game.com as well.
12/06/09 – Added New Shops (untested!) category.
05/29/09 – Added OnlineKeyStore, cdkeyshop and CDkey-Game.com has been added again as well, added an additional comment about user experiences
05/28/09 – Amazon has been put on disapproved list, GAME.co.uk has been added to the approved list
05/01/09 – GamersGate contains regional locked games.
04/19/09 – Added an additional comments part at the bottom of the page
04/09/09 – Removed CDkey-Game.com after receiving feedback about it (of it possibly being fraudulent)
04/07/09 – Added CDkey-Game.com to the list (has no SSL)
03/25/09 – Impulse contains regional locked games
03/23/09 – Added DE/FR/IT store links of Metaboli and that the store contains DRM games
06/16/09 – The list is no longer maintained by the original author. Please forward all messages to other maintainers/administrators when you deem it necessary.

* Additional comments

Please remember to report your shopping experience with any of the shops above, whether good or bad. This gives us a better insight if the shops are reliable enough or not.

When this whole campaign was started and named 1€ ≠ 1$ (one euro is not one dollar), we all hoped that by this it would eventually be corrected.

This is not the case. At start we complained to the EU commission about the price difference. Whether it be the price difference in the US vs EU or UK vs EU Steam case.

In the end, sadly, 1 euro is 1 dollar if Valve decides it is. The recent response from the European Commission explained this very clearly (and it was maybe too complicated for some people to understand, thus this post).

We have nothing against Valve any more, or do we? Well not in the currency case anyway, they can charge us whatever they want, and Europe allows it.

However there is one thing I do want to mention in this quick news announcement after the European Commission response announcement. One of our dear Steam Forums users Jani666 made this apparent (right here).

I’ll just get down to the point:
Part of the 97/7/EC directive: “whereas it means that consumers should be able to have access to the goods and services of another Member State on the same terms as the population of that State;”

(A directive is a legislative act, which is a statutory law, which is a written law, yeah they go far to cover it up in complicated words. In theory it’s only binding to member states who they are addressed to, in practice all directives except for the Common Agricultural Policy are addressed to all member states)

Or in other words, the UK is a member of the EU. UK citizens can access the UK store, which means that any other EU citizen has that same right under the same terms.

Even if Valve will officially respond to this (or even correct the prices towards US pricing), they will have to open up the UK shop to Europe or face the legal consequences.

What can you do? Go back in time and file a new complaint but however this time, mention the above directive piece and tell as an EU citizen you are being blocked from an United Kingdom online store.

Link to the complain form:
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/forms/consumer_form.html

Example:
http://steamunpowered.eu/example.html (thanks to Stranded for this great example page)

This will probably will be one of the last real announcements for a while. If enough people file a complaint we’ll hopefully get a response within a month or so again. So head out once more and tell this to everyone you know that is interested in this.