Steam Has Me Hot

At the beginning of March I wanted to play Borderlands, a game that is distributed by a company called Steam that also hosts many, many, many other games over the internet. The thing about Steam is that you have to hold an account with them in order to play their games. And for various reasons they can disable your account, close it, etc as they see fit.

On March 4^th I discovered that my account had been disabled for a reason that wasn’t clear to me so I had to submit a ticket to their support group and wait for an answer. Over a week later I was informed that my account was disabled because of a $6.69 expansion pack for Borderlands that I purchased back in December because CapitalOne disputed the charge, possibly because it looked suspicious. So it was up to me to close the dispute with CapitalOne and then have Steam charge the card again.

I didn’t realize at the time the scope of the problem. ALL of my games with Steam were non-transferable to another account and were therefore rendered worthless because a $6.69 dispute. Close to $400 in games collected of the years now worth absolutely nothing. They won’t charge another card, they won’t attempt to charge anything until I settle this with CapitalOne.

This morning I raised Hell with a CapitalOne dispute operator-whatever to obtain some sort of documentation that I could give to Steam to officially let them know that the dispute was dropped. Sometimes it DOES help to raise a little Hell and demand to speak to someone higher up. In 7-10 days I should have some sort of document to hand over to Steam to settle this and have them recharge my card in order to re-open my account, but I’m not holding my breath.

All I can say is that this is the most convoluted way of doing business. Hundreds of dollars of purchased games held hostage for less than $7. That includes games that I haven’t purchased online and hold the physical DVDs to and should be able to install anywhere when my account is in good standing. And it took 3 months for them to do this? Amazing.