Steam users who bought Reality Pump's 2006 RTS Earth 2160 from the service have been unable to play the game since February, with no help from support, a thread on their forums tells us.

The problem is upon launching a message pops up saying "There was an error authorizing your Earth 2160 install. Failed to get steamid", and from there, the game will not start. This appears to be due to an update to the Steam client which was rolled out around this time; the retail version works perfectly. Nearly 200 posts follow the initial report, with many of them citing the same issue, so it's far from an isolated problem (it's reported "some, if not all" users are experiencing it).

A number of users are resorting to modified executables and running from the installation directory, with mixed results.

Steam support has said before it's "aware of the problem", but nothing has been done since February, and there's no word on a fix. One user says they've received a requested refund, while another says they had theirs denied.

The thread was made note of in the Good Old Games forums by a user concerned the title's upcoming release there would suffer a similar problem. Another user, reading this, tipped off Shacknews who ran the story promptly. Within hours, the game was removed from the shop (its product page no longer works and hasn't been moved anywhere else).

One GOG user writes of even worse past experiences of their own (one set of many being discussed):

"Jagged Alliance 2 [...] was broken for over a year. [Two Worlds] is still without it's patch, it also doesn't list the DRM on the product page. At least in the case of Two Worlds, you can use the retail patch, but it could cause you to lose yet another activation in the process. But the situation with JA2 was so bad that the publishers were actually giving people free access to their DD versions to replace the broken Steam ones." 

Valve was contacted by Shack yesterday, but no response has been received as of yet. We'll keep you posted if anything else happens with this (feel free to let us know in the comments or via e-mail, too).