Steam Account Issues

[Plutonius]

A quick question for those that use Steam.

My brother hadn't logged into his Steam account for about 300 days and he had Counter - Strike: Source on his computer through Steam (I gifted it to him). He just tried logging in recently (Mac) and his account was gone. When he contacted Steam, they told him that his account was gone and that he needed to make a new account if he wanted to use Steam.

- Has anyone else experienced this issue ?
- Any ideas on how to get the Counter - Strike: Source attached to his new account (I'm assuming the game is on his computer since he did download the gift and he played it) ?

For those that say contact Steam, we did and they had no interest (or couldn't) in resolving the problem.

If Steam can lose your account and your purchases, I have no desire in purchasing from them again. Digital downloads are nice but I'll return to physical media if they can't guarantee that they will not lose your account / purchases.

 

[Hansr]

Call them instead of going through the support thingy?

 

[Plutonius]

Call them instead of going through the support thingy?

Ty but we both called them and went through on-line support .

 

[Consultant]

Nope.

Steam does not delete inactive accounts.

Maybe he used a weak password that was guessed and abused. There is nothing we can do here. You need to contact customer service.

If you gifted him something, then you'll have a record somewhere you can give to his new account.

 

[flindet]

Re: Steam Account Issues

I sincerely hope I'm wrong here, but if your brother already accepted the gift with the other account (and it sounds like he did if he installed it), then I don't think you have any way to re-gift that to another account without assistance from Support.

Are you sure that the account is actually gone? Consultant may be on to something with her/his theory that the account was actually stolen. I've heard support can help you retrieve a stolen account. You may need to show them something like the credit card that purchased the game and maybe identification or something. I don't know. I know they've asked for scans of stuff like that.

I'd call Steam support again and if you still don't get a satisfactory answer, I'd ask them to escalate the ticket. Admittedly, I don't know all the fine print of the EULA, but Valve simply taking your game due to inactivity definitely sounds wrong.

 

[Plutonius]

The problem was solved by Steam and he got his account / games back. Ironically, the phone support did not work but the on-line support worked after 2 days (in most things, it's the other way around). We still don't know the reason for the initial problem but everything worked out ok.