Proving ownership of games purchased via Steam
I have the issue described in the entry "Steam users unable to create Spore account or redeem game on Origin"
For a week now, I have been communicating with EA support over it. Finally, I managed to get them, through a chat session, to understand the core of the problem, and to get them aware that the solution involving CD keys which they previously kept suggesting, was no longer viable.
Their next approach was to guide me through proving my purchase of Spore in steam, via screenshots!
Now I know that screenshots are being widely used as proofs for similar cases, which is absurd, in my opinion. More so when better means exist already.
What matters in my case, however, is that support agents are instructed to follow a specific procedure, described in EA's help website, which requires two screenshots: one of the transaction history, and one of the confirmation email sent by Steam following the purchase. For my bad luck, I had deleted the email message few days after the purchase, and it was no longer available (not even in the trash) by the time we reached the point they required it.
And even though Steam provides a means to view the purchase receipts on their website, there's no way to have it resent by email. The EA support agents, however, refuse to accept a screenshot of the webpage of the receipt from its source that has the receipt number in its URL, and insist on a screenshot of the email!! Just because it is what is described in their procedure.
When I asked the agent to escalate the issue to someone who can look into it further, citing that Steam allows third parties to enumerate licenses of the games owned by a user to third parties, if the user chooses to make it public, and that many websites actually do use that, he rejected, and instead explained to me how "EA have servers that are not the same as Steam, so we cannot see the users' licenses at Steam"!! An answer that assumes customers, in this case gamers, to be ignorant, when in fact most gamers are more technically capable than the support persons I have talked to.
Access to CD keys was disabled by Steam months ago because of the infamous exploit affecting EA games. Steam provides a means to prove ownership of the license on their platform. EA should create a tool that can use that API and avail it to their support agents, or EA should stop selling their games on Steam.
The absurdity about the over-dependency on screenshots as means to prove anything and everything nowadays, is due to how trivial it is to forge them. Everyone should know this by now, especially the DRM spearheads, who are hopelessly trying to be a step ahead of the much smarter young population of the world, and who go to great lengths to protect their IP, up to the step of effectively reducing the market of their games, or even inadvertently introducing technical defects in them that make them unplayable by the people who purchase them. The forums of Steam, the largest social space of gamers known, are full of complaints and disgruntlement.
Finally, the fixation on the transaction of acquiring the game's license excludes other lawful cases, such as having won the game in a giveaway, or having it donated or gifted from a friend, and other cases that cannot be established by a transaction of purchase as is currently expected. All of these cases, however, could be covered by just implementing a tool that utilizes the API which Steam makes available for this purpose.
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Double DRM is synergetic failure; a failure greater than the sum of its failing parts.
