Valve unbans Modern Warfare 2 players, gives gifts

When we received a couple of complaints about Steam wrongfully banning Modern Warfare 2 players, I was a little skeptical. Flash forward 500 “Guys, did you hear about this?” emails later, I feel bad for the initial doubt, and we have a lovely update to the original story.

Affected users have been given an apology from Valve president Gabe Newell, in addition to a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2, plus another copy for gifting. From his email:

The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game. This wasn’t a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).

If the issue is not specific to just Modern Warfare 2, why are all the complaints we’ve been hearing about only related to that one game? Hmm. At any rate, I’d say this situation was handled pretty darn well.