Sometimes, you have to wonder what a publisher is thinking, as I now know what some people go through when it comes to copy protection. 

Today, I decided to finally buy The Club for the PC, because I had found it at the price point where I was willing to buy it ($29.99).  I had liked the concept of the game, but did not feel it was worth a $50 investment when it first came out.  Now at thirty bucks, I feel the achievements, cross platform play and fun I had with the demo will not go to waste.

Or so I thought.  As you can tell from the picture above, I am not actually playing The Club.  It wasn’t because of me not wanting to play it, but the fact that my version of the game was lacking a CD Key, so I could not get authorized to play the game.

As PC Gamers, we have all heard the story before.  Someone comes into a forum, and immediately asks, “My game shipped without a CD Key, can anyone help?”, to which we all start to jump on the pile and call him a dirty rotten no good pirate, and get out of our forum.  I cannot even count on my fingers how many times I have gone through this as someone that feels there is no way a game could ship without a CD Key.  Until today that is, as I did not get mine with The Club.

So I immediately went to a couple of forums and asked the question about a missing CD Key, to which got me run out of dodge pretty fast, and banned on one forum, until I provided an email with a scanned copy of the receipt, along with the above picture.  Seems that I was getting my just dues, and I had done the same thing to so many people, blaming them for being a pirate, when they may have gone through the same thing.

Only after a lot of Google searching did I finally come across an article, that was in a cached copy of a Sega Tech site that stated that a batch of The Club discs went out without the CD Key being included in the box.  Vindication of me not being a criminal, but why was this not available on the main Sega support site.  It would seem that this would be something you would want available to people considering it just happened recently.  It would have saved me a call to Best Buy (special thanks to the lady that opened a copy over the phone to verify my claims). 

Finally, after much digging, I finally found my issue, but it was in a generic area, and not in The Club support area.  I have submitted for a trouble ticket, and it seems that this must of just happened, as the support page showed a date of June 2008.  I will hopefully have a code in 48 hours, but now I have a game, that I want to play but cannot play, at least for Achievements sake, until the codes come in.  Thank you Sega, for making me feel what it is like to be the villian, instead of performing a bit of quality control on your discs.  If you are having a problem with this, head over to the Sega support form, register and look for an article for CD Key not being in the box.  You will have to submit a trouble ticket, but it will get you a key.  You will also have to submit a copy of the receipt, if you want it to happen promptly.  I assume a manual cover could also do, but I can’t say, as I still had my receipt.  I will follow up when I finally get my code.