I have bought Skyrim a few times, for different platforms and some special edition stuff
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I remember Skyrim releasing a "Special Edition" of some kind on Steam a few years ago, which (from rough memory) the owners of the existing edition on Steam were supposed to get automatically upgraded to if had some kind of pass. Or along those lines, I don't remember the exact details any more.
I do remember that even though I had the required pass, they never gave me the Special Edition version of Skyrim that I was supposed to be upgraded to. Typical Valve. :/
As to Skyrim, there's a chance that's on Bethesda's side rather than Valve's. I haven't used their publishing tools, but it's possible someone specified the upgrade criteria incorrectly. Even if it's late, you could try reaching out to Valve's support. They might say no, but it's worth trying.
Generally that's good advice, but I've had enough negative experiences with Valve Support that my policy now is "Valve can fuck themselves sideways".
Thus only buying things from GOG or anything-other-than-Valve these days. Not going to bother contacting them for this. :)
That's surprising to me, but your reaction is understandable. GOG's business model also caters exactly to the type of fan and scenario I was talking about in my top-level comment. For example, GOG has Daggerfall, an early TES game from Bethesda [1].
> from GOG or anything-other-than-Valve
How do you organize your games for launch? I've heard of people using Steam as their main UI, but it seems you probably use another option to browse and launch.
[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_elder_scrolls_chapter_ii_dag...
I still use Steam, as I enjoy some of the games I've already bought (eg Eufloria). Just won't be paying more money to them ever again.
For everything else, I've been using Lutris (last several months), and it seems good enough.