To quote my favourite drag queen, "This is not an oops, it's an AARRGH!", as AMD loses DIRT 3 codes and the wrong version of Dead Island ends up on steam. UPDATED.
If misery loves company, then the folks at AMD, Codemasters and Dead Island developer Deep Silver really need to hang out together - preferably somewhere with a good supply of strong liquor.
The incidents are unrelated, of course, but coming within 24 hours of each other it adds up to some serious comedy fail. First up, Dead Island, which is having a problematic launch regardless (with word of a zero-day patch that fixes a whopping 37 issues, but Deep Silver is not doing themselves any favours by...
... Uploading the wrong version of the game for Steam retail. Yep, the version that everyone's bought is the developer version, complete with cheats and codes for bug-testing. Without going into detail, this is hardly surprising, as even the review code for this game has been an awkward mess that's lead to countless journos downloading tens of gigabytes of useless, unactivated code.
This is a moot point for us Aussies, though, as we're not getting the game until Friday, anyway.
So it must be a fun time to be a fly on the wall of Deep Silver's no doubt heavily stressed out office.
As to the AMD/Codies issue, it's not really their fault that up to THREE MILLION* activation codes for DIRT 3 (a game that's bundled with a mess of AMD GPUs) have been nicked from a thrid party server. But that's likely cold comfort right now, and all involved plus Steam (must be a busy day there, too) are working on the problem.
We recommend taking a moment today, especially if you're experiencing work issues yourself, to reflect on these problems and realise that perhaps today is not so bad after all...
*UPDATE: There's a lot of different figures going around the net at the moment, and the three million is looking like the upper limit. Other report the figure as low as hundreds of thousands.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012