Until it's fixed...
Splinter Cell Blacklist is by most measures, a fantastic game. It has a strong single player and competitive multiplayer mode, with unique gameplay options and all of the mixture of stealth and action that fans of the series know and love. It reviewed well among gamers and critics, in an impressive entry in a packed marketplace.
But if you tried to play it on Steam after buying it this weekend, you'd have found yourself not able to do so. Not because the game itself was broken, but because Valve ran out of keys.
Like a number of games on Steam, Blacklist not only requires a Steam purchase, but you need to have a key from the publisher too. Those make it easier to keep track of who has bought the game, as well as adding a secondary layer of copy protection. However in a surprise case, Valve actually ran out of the keys, but kept selling the game any way.
That meant that a number of people purchased Splinter Cell Blacklist, but found themselves unable to play because the promised key had not been delivered. This is a problem that's been going on since the sale started on October 28 too, so it's not one that was fixed in short order, or even at all at the time of writing.
Although the problem has been acknowledged and new keys are supposedly being sent out, there aren't many reports of people receiving them just yet.
