Recently it seems that Nvidia has been running a promotion that included a free key to Gears of War 4 if you purchased one of their new GPUs. Unfortunately, like anything it seems that some people have found a way to abuse this, which has led to The Coalition now revoking access to a number of Gears 4 keys gained through this method.

The loophole involved purchasing a GTX 1070 through Amazon, which would come with the free code which would be e-mailed to the customer. Having gotten the code, the order was then cancelled and the key would either be redeemed by the customer or sold on to someone else.

Because of this, the company was revoked access to the game for anyone with the keys they judge to be illegitimately obtained. The news was broken by community director Adam Fletcher through a NeoGAF thread and includes a number of keys purchased through key reseller sites.

“We detected some Gears 4 Windows 10 keys were obtained illegitimately via our Nvidia promotion,” Fletcher announced via a thread about the promotion. “We have gone ahead and revoked keys that fell in this bucket. If you believe your key was incorrectly revoked, we highly recommend you contact Nvidia support with proof of purchase to help out with this.”

The problem comes from the fact that some people legitimately did buy their Nvidia hardware, but simply didn’t want the game that came with it – so they sold it on. This unfortunately leaves whoever bought the code from them with something they now cannot use, unless the person who sold them the code is willing to help them out at all.

It’s a good example of those who exploit something ruining it for people who haven’t really done anything wrong. As well as why it’s better to get your keys from somewhere like Steam or GoG where you know that there’s little chance of them ceasing to work.