When purchasing some retail versions of our games, the media (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) contains your license key. You need the media in order to authenticate and use the product. If you lose the media, you lose the product.
When purchasing some of our games from online distributors (e.g. Direct2Drive, Gamer's Gate etc), you will be sent your DRM license key in the email of your purchase. If you have any issues with your licence key, you need to contact them directly using the information provided in your purchase email as we have no control over DRM license keys used by other services.
When purchasing our games from Digital River, your DRM license key is injected into the program before download. Sometimes your browser security settings, firewall etc may prevent this from happening. When that happens and you try to run the game, you will get a prompt to activate the product since the DRM key will be missing. If this happens, send email to [email protected] and include your original purchase receipt sent to you via email. We use this information to look up your DRM key and send it to you directly. You can then use it to manually activate the game. You can also try using the license/activation reset option below.
We have changed DRM schemes over the years (e.g. we no longer use SafeDisc, Starforce or ActiveMark). So if you own a legacy product that uses one of these schemes - we will not be able to re-issue DRM license keys if the products are no longer supported. You can try using the license/activation reset option below.
If you apply a new patch which uses a different DRM scheme (e.g. you apply a Digital River patch version to a Direct2Drive purchased version) than the previous version you are using, your DRM license key will be invalidated. If this happens, you will need to uninstall the game, re-install and then apply the correct patch for your version.
LICENSE/ACTIVATION RESET
If you upgraded your machine or have run out of activations for some products (below), as long as the game is still installed, you can possibly retrieve your activation license or reset it by downloading one of the files below and extracting it into the game folder thereby overwriting pre-existing files.
Before doing this, you MUST ensure that you are i) running the LATESTPATCH version of the game ii) you are NOT attempting this with the Steam version of the game.
If this doesn't work, send email to [email protected] and include your original purchase receipt sent to you via email. We use this information to look up your DRM key for Direct2Drive, Gamers Gate, Digital River etc and send it to you directly. You can then use it to manually re-activate the game or increase your license activations.
