OK, so this is going to require a bit of explaining.
Half life 2 was released in 2004, and like a lot of other gamers, I bought a copy of the game. I went to a shop called GAME, paid to £30 or so it was to buy this game, went home a played it. At this point in time, me and my brother both played on steam.
After this, I decided to buy a special edition pack that gave me a cool tin box and half life source. This was about £25 I think, and I figured it was a pretty good deal. So I bought this, went home and activated it using aforementioned steam account.
Later, on the release of half life 2 episode one, my brother ventured out to the shop called GAME and spent another £20 buying another copy of half life 2, bundled with episode one and half life source.
Then, on the release of the orange box, my brother went and bought that for xbox, again paying a good £30 of his money on it.
So, to surmise, me and my brother own four copies of half life 2, three of which are tied to one steam account.
Since going to uni, I don't really use steam any more. I've been concentrating more on molecular orbitals and thermodynamics (as well as some pharmacology, mathematics and astronomy thrown in for good measure) and so I haven't really had time for gaming. However, I did go online and register a steam account so that I could play half life 2. I phoned my brother up to see if I could use the special edition key and pull it from his account to mine with no avail. Turned out I needed the cd. No problem I thought, I'll just do it in the holidays.
Coming back this summer, I decided that I could reward myself for doing well at university (achieved 77% average for Chemistry, my degree and core module) I would install half life 2 now that I had the cd and key in front of me. Alas, steam complained the key was registered to another account.
So, after e-mailing them telling me of my problem, and how only my brother at present could play the three copies of half life 2 registered to his account, they politely referred me to their disclaimer which reminded me I cannot transfer cd keys between steam accounts.
What is my position on this? It seems utterly ridiculous that I OWN three copies of half life 2 and yet because of little bits of circumstance, I cannot play any of them. I'm fairly certain there are laws against this, and I'm not trying to dupe anybody here, I just want to play half life 2!
What's the best way of going about this?
Cheers
Andy