I’ve been using Collectorz for years now. To bring you up to speed, “Collectorz.com is a series of catalogue programs for cataloguing your music, movie, book, comic, game, audio file and photo file collection in a database.”

I have even defended it while my brother, languishing on my bed in his best impression of Hedonism Bot during one of his interstate visits, and bathed in the light from his MacBook, extolled the benefits of Delicious Library.

“But,” I said, “I don’t run a Mac. Besides, I know it’s a bit more expensive, but It’s worth it and covers all future upgrades.”

Just to be clear, while I agree with most that Collectorz is a terrible name, I’ve always been pretty happy. I read the emails when they come, and while I currently only use Game Collector, I have gone so far as to recommend the other versions to friends and family.

Now, I’ve been having a bad week. The absolute ‘crapalanche’™ of things that went wrong on Tuesday doesn’t bare repeating, and yesterday I had a not very pleasant trip to the doctor. So, when I got home and found that Collectorz had sent me an email announcing version 3 of Game Collector, including spiffy new features, I was somewhat cheered. So I opened the program and hit ‘Upgrade’, and away it chuffed, downloading the new goodies that I was eager to test out.

Until it told me my license key was no longer valid.

See, stupid me, had a license key for version 2, and this was version 3! The audacity of me to think that when I was told my initial cost would cover all future upgrades, I would think that it would cover my upgrade from version 2 to version 3!

No where in the email, the documentation before or during the upgrade did Collectorz feel the need to tell me this would happen. But, lo and behold, they are willing to offer me a 50% discount on my version 3 key, meaning it will only be $25!

It’s not the money in this case, it’s the principle. It’s the fact I feel bad for defending this company and product to others, only to be lied to and, as I see it, tricked.

I will be contacting the company about this, but given my week I felt the need to get this off my chest first. I actually wish I used their Movie Collector so I could enter How To Lose Friends & Alienate People as one final gesture. As it is, Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City!, doesn’t have the same ring of ‘fuck you’ I’m looking for.

~Warlach