This is something that happened around May 2008, but I thought I’d share it with you.  There are several incidences of idiocy in this story, but at least it has a happy(ish) ending.

This is one of those posts that’s kind of long.  You may want to grab yourself a snack before you read any further.

I was looking through Steam’s game offerings one day, when I noticed the Commandos pack (containing all four Commandos games) for a relatively decent price.  I bought it, and happily downloaded my four new games.

Figuring I’d start at the beginning, I started up Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and played the first mission.  Halfway through, I had to leave the computer, so I attempted to save and quit.

The “save” option was grayed out.  A few hours of googling confirmed it – Commandos does not work properly on Windows XP, and there’s basically no consistent way to fix it.

So, I e-mailed Eidos tech support, explaining where I bought the game (Steam) and what the problem was (the Save option is grayed out and unusable).  Their auto-response on May 10 read “we’ll assign a tech to this as soon as possible.”

Two days later, I got the following e-mail:  “You can quick-save by pressing Control-S.  This is on page 4 of the manual.”

Besides the fact that their “solution” completely ignores my problem, quicksave didn’t work either. What’s worse, I bought the game on Steam, and therefore didn’t get a manual – they’d know that, if they had actually read my initial e-mail.

My reponse was lengthy but polite; I explained these two problems, added that my Googling found that tons of other people were having the same problem, and further remarked that they should not be selling broken games.  Finally, I requested that they actually look in to the issue rather than copy and paste a scripted reply.

Their response was a request that I send them a DxDiag diagnostic file as an attachment, which seemed to me to be progress towards a result.  I promptly sent them the file.

Unfortunately, they closed the ticket after a few days without no explanation.

I opened a new ticket, providing the same information.  The first set of e-mail exchanges were repeated almost verbatim; finally, I sent another DxDiag diagnostic file.

They closed the ticket again, this time mentioning that they never got the dxdiag file.  After several exchanged e-mails, we found out that their e-mail system blocks attachments.

If their e-mail system rejects attachments, why would they tell people to send them attached files?

Anyway, I copied the contents of the dxdiag file into an e-mail directly, and sent that to them.

In response, several days later, they sent me PDFs of the game manuals.  This was not even remotely relevant, and I sent them an e-mail stating as much.

Several days later, I got an e-mail message containing the following (and here I’ll copy and paste from the actual e-mail):

“I spoke with the development team, who said there are a couple reasons you might be experiencing problems with our games.” (No, really?)

” – Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was released in 1998, and only supports Windows 98, not Windows XP.” (Unfortunately, Steam explicitly prevents you from running games in Win98 compatibility mode.)

” – Laptop configurations vary too widely to be able to support them all, so we don’t support laptops.” (Desktops are even more varied than laptops.)

” – Many laptops are limited in their ability to be used as gaming machines. This is because of memory configurations, their micro-channel architecture, port configurations and sound systems that are primarily designed to be used with productivity software.”  (Besides the obviously inaccurate technobabble, there’s no reason a modern 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB DDR2 RAM and a GeForce 7300 Go should have trouble with a game from 1998.)

” – The other common problem is that laptop systems will attempt to compress the traditional version of the standard 101-function keyboard (found on almost all desktop systems) into a much smaller keyboard configuration. This is usually done by relying on multifunction keys that allow the user to assign different functions to the same key. Unfortunately, this has been known to cause problems with our games.”  (This is, of course, theoretically possible, but ridiculous nonetheless.)

” – Sorry, we can’t help you.  Contact Steam for a refund.” (Steam’s policy is that they don’t give refunds, and they make this abundantly clear every time you make a purchase.)

I was kind of taken aback at this point; they were basically saying “we don’t care, go away.”

Rather than give up, though, I replied that the issue was also present on my desktop computer; I referred them to three forum threads on three different sites (one of which was on Eidos’ own forum) in which various users were having the same issue; I pointed out various other bugs people have with the games under Windows XP, including an “OUTPUT” folder being missing (manually creating it fixed some issues for some users; this folder was not missing on either of my machines).

I never got a reply.

In the meantime, I decided to make a phone call to Valve’s tech support.  (Dr Kleiner’s voice greets you, which is kind of nifty.)  I spoke with a first-teir support guy for a few minutes; he agreed that the situation was ridiculous, and told me he’d get back to me later that day after speaking with his superiors.

I then called Eidos’ tech support on the phone.  She asked that I send in a dxdiag report from my desktop and a summary of what had happened so far.

Later that day, the guy at Valve called me back saying that they had approved a refund of my purchase (which, again, is something Valve officially “never does”); I asked if I could wait a bit to see if Eidos would fix the problem, since I really did want to play the games.  He agreed, and gave me his direct number.

Moments after I got off the phone with Valve, Eidos responded to my e-mail with “Make sure the folder named ‘OUTPUT’ is being created when Steam installs the game.”  Sound familiar?

I responded by saying “That’s not the problem here.  You seem entirely unwilling to help, you’re selling a game written for one OS on a platform incompatible with your game, and you refuse to fix it.  Valve has offered me a refund, something they claim to never do, so I’m taking it.”

I called the guy at Valve – I wish I still had his name, so I could praise him directly – and got my refund.

So I had my refund, but Injustice (TM) was still being perpetrated.  The guy at Valve said he couldn’t get them to stop selling the broken game, but he’d bring it up when he got the chance.  (Last I checked, Steam no longer sells Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines or Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, so apparently SOMEBODY got something through the red tape.)

That’s my happyish ending.  “ish” because I wanted to play those games, but happy because I got my money back and they don’t sell the broken games on Steam anymore.

There are a few things I left out of the above account.  I tried calling other people:

- The reception voicemail at Eidos HQ was always full.

- I tried calling other people at Eidos (whose direct numbers are readily available online), including their VP of marketing, and I left messages on their machines since they never answer their phones, but I never received a reply.

- I sent Gabe Newell at Valve an e-mail about the issue, but never got a reply, though honestly I didn’t expect one.

- I sent the Consumerist an e-mail about it, but even I’ll admit it’s not interesting enough for them to pick up the story.

So.. that’s it.  If you managed to read the whole thing, I’ll buy you a cookie if we ever meet in person