Your billing address doesn’t look like it matches up with your current country. Please contact support for assistance or use a payment method registered to your current address.

It seems to be caused by more bad programming on Valve’s part:

1. The software incorrectly believes it can detect what country you are in based on your IP address.
2. The software incorrectly believes the country you are in affects the validity of your credit card.

Unfortunately there is no easy work around. The first time this happened to me the solution was to change my IP address. I suppose you could also use PayPal instead to pay but PayPal sucks in its own right (their terms of services basically give them carte blanche to rip you off seven ways to Sunday.) A third solution, one which I haven’t tried, could be to sign up for a disposable CC number and set your billing address to something the software approves off. I don’t know if this works.

The second time it happened, some months later, I just put my credit card back in my wallet. I’m not going to fight to spend my money.

I really want an idea like Steam to work but after my experiences so far I think I have to move on. Steam is not a new product – they have had plenty of chances to fix these shortcomings. Maybe Direct 2 Drive is better?

I’m not even talking about the customer hostile DRM or the constant calling home annoyance. No, it’s the program’s basic functionality I have got a problem with. Today I booted up Windows for the first time in months to try to get an hour of Fallout 3 before going to bed, something well deserved after a long work day. Alas, it was not to be. Without asking me Steam began downloading an enormous update for Fallout the moment I started the computer.

I checked online and found out that there were no updates to Fallout 3 I needed. The most recent update did fix a few bugs, but nothing critical enough that it couldn’t wait until next time I played.

So naturally I right clicked the update in Steam and selected “Pause update”. That didn’t seem to work too well – Steam showed me a permanent “Download stopping…” indicator while in the background it continued to download the update anyhow.

I clicked “Launch Game”. Got a popup saying the game will be ready to play in “approximately 40 minutes”. Apparently Steam didn’t get the message when I paused the update. Okay, so I thought I would be a little more clear. I right clicked the game and selected “Properties” and then turned off automatic updates for the game. That froze the software. I killed it and restarted it. The setting had saved when I checked in properties again but the download continued anyhow.

So in my infinite patience I went into “Offline” mode. Surely it would give up on the idea of downloading updates if it wasn’t even online. I restarted. Tried to launch the game and it told me the game couldn’t be run.

I opened up the Steam folder and deleted a random “AppUpdateStats” file. No dice. Steam still refused to start the game.

At the end of the day all I got to do was to write an angry blog posting instead of getting to play even a minute – the update still isn’t done – because of an update I don’t even want and ultimately because Valve has managed to create the first downloader program in history without a working cancel button.

As a user I have to say it’s enormously frustrating when a computer program does not do what I tell it to. As a software developer I have to say I’m disappointed that a program that could have been such a natural success and fit right into the 21st century is being developed with so little common sense. How hard is it to write a downloader?