Three Wise Men

Today I got this urge to play Neverwinter Nights 2. Fantasy role playing game that I never actually played¹. So, I visited few local online stores to check if it is available for purchase. It wasn’t. Then I tried few real stores, the kind you have to dress and go out of your house to see what they are selling! Yes, I sacrificed myself so I would be able to play this excellent game. The problem is that NWN2 is quite old and I couldn’t find the DVD package anywhere. Then I tried Steam with no success. Want to know how I tackled the problem, read on!

After a little bit of digging I found that Atari actually has their own E-Store and NWN2 is available for purchase and download and you can pay with Paypal. Great, I added it to my Shopping Cart².

Proceeding to checkout worked as it should.

Then I clicked Confirm Payment. Yay, soon I’ll be able to download NWN2!

And then????

I tried countless times. Always the same result. I can’t confirm my Paypal purchase. Must be the wrong browser you say, IE8 sucks? Well IE8 is the second browser I tried this with. In Firefox 3.5 I got one step further. I was able to login into my Paypal account and then when I clicked Confirm Purchase on the Paypal I was thrown back to the Atari store to the screen above. And that was it. Yes, my Paypal account is valid and I made a donation less than two weeks ago and it was successfully charged to my credit card. Update: I tried buying something on Steam and steam correctly informed me that Paypal didn’t authorize my payment. Why, I don’t know.

I tried with German, UK and EU Atari stores and all of them behaved in the same way.

As software developer and somebody who deals with bugs on a daily basis I understand that things can go wrong from time to time and I appreciate all the feedback I can get from the users. So I decided to contact Atari right away. I tried.

And failed.

There is a Contact Us link at the bottom of the page and it doesn’t work. It brings you back to the front page of the store. In fact none of the footer links actually works. This is what you get if you click on About Atari or Legal Info.

Good work guys, who do I send a bug report to if I can’t contact anyone?

I wonder where are the days of the good old Atari? I owned Atari 512ST, Atari 1024STFM and used Atari Falcon, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar. This now, feels like an Atari Zombie … :(

Looking at this from another perspective makes me wonder where can someone get a little older piece of software legally if publisher’s online store is broken, not available or non-existent. What if the publisher is long time gone? This problem walks hand-in-hand with DRM, copyrights and the ability of digital data formats and storage having the potential of outliving all other means of storage, books for example.

Update:

So, I really do want this game today! Someone suggested me to use Direct2Drive. I did try buying Neverwinter Nights and upon checkout I was surprised by the error that D2D gave me: Neverwinter Nights 2 is Country restricted on your IP. I really don’t encourage piracy I am actually very much against it, but when Direct2Drive refused to sell me the game I went back to Atari E-Store and this time I used a Credit Card, different one, not even mine, to purchase Neverwinter Nights and again I wasn’t able to purchase the game. I got no error messages on what seems to be the problem. Now, I ask about word of advice. I’d really like to play this thing, so what should I do?

Move?

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