A few Orange Box purchasers took the interesting step of acquiring their product key for the new game in Thailand, but have found that developer are less than impressed with their free-market quick-thinking - revealing that such product keys will be deactivated.

Naturally, the customers in question feel rather hard done by, pointing out that they haven't pirated the game, merely purchased it (albeit more cheaply) from a country other than their own. Valve defend their move thusly: "Valve uses for territory control to make sure products authorised for use in certain territories are not being distributed and used outside of those territories."

"In this case, a Thai website was selling box product keys for Thailand to people outside of Thailand. Since those keys are only for use in Thailand, people who purchased product keys from the Thai website are not able to use those product keys in other territories."

Gamers buying Thai keys have also struggled to make subsequent locally purchased copies of the game work - but Valve are a little more helpful in this situation. "Some of these users have subsequently purchased a copy after realising the issue and were having difficulty removing the illegitimate keys from their Steam accounts," the developer's statement assures. "Anyone having this problem should contact Steam Support to have the Thai key removed from their Steam account."

By Luke Guttridge