A Steam user with the nickname pablocelreal shared his experience interacting with customer support. He tried to regain access to his account, which is over ten years old, but encountered a major problem.
According to pablocelreal, his Steam account has “thousands of hours in games, a huge library,” but recently it was blocked due to a security system trigger “because of some 'unusual activity' that wasn't actually there.”
The player contacted Steam support and provided various account details in his request — old email addresses, previous passwords, the last 4 digits of his payment card, and his phone number.
The specialist demanded a photo of the CD key from the Half-Life 2 box (from 2005), with his request ID written on a piece of paper next to it.
pablocelreal is very unhappy — a lot of time has passed since he bought the game, and he threw away the physical edition of Half-Life 2 a long time ago:
Dude, it's been 21 years. Back then I was a kid living with my parents, then I moved out, and of course, that cardboard box was thrown away a long time ago. How does Valve even expect anyone to keep physical packaging for more than two decades in an era of completely digital distribution?
When he told Steam support that he “couldn't provide a museum exhibit,” they replied:
We understand that some of the requested information is very old and you may not be able to provide it. If you believe the key is lost and cannot be found, I recommend you create a new account for free. If you cannot find this CD key that you used when creating the account, we will not be able to help you and will have to close this request.
The player is unhappy that he was deprived of an account with a game collection, and then offered to “create a new account.” Now he is trying to reach Valve through other channels to get his account back.