There's a fairly good point to be made here.
On one hand, I think it should be up to us to expend reasonable means to back up and store our stuff. Reasonable, however, depends on your means. Some people don't have the money for an external drive, or aren't savvy enough to think it's necessary.
But then, there's the developer angle. When you provide a replacement key, it's a pain in the neck, but the net cost to you is nothing, as far as I'm aware. You are literally just allowing someone to re-access a product they have already bought. if you want to alienate customers, go ahead and selectively institute a no-key-replacement policy alongside a price tag which is among the highest I have ever seen for an audio game. I think this is bad business practice, and don't even get me started on all the design decisions that have plagued this developer in particular. The point is, even reasonable means sometimes fail, and I don't think it's unreasonable that a player should be able to come to you and say "Hey so-and-so, I'm really sorry to do this to you but my hard drive busted/I got a new machine, and I love your game, and can I have a replacement key please? I'm really sorry I don't have a backup of my original key or email or whatever". And if you want to keep that customer a happy customer, you do a couple of minutes of legwork and give them a key. End of story. Failure to do so, in my opinion at least, speaks to a lot of negative characteristics which good developers shouldn't have, or at least shouldn't have too much of.
Now, with that out of the way, I started with responsibility for a reason, and I do realize that replacing people's keys is annoying. That said, I think some sort of software which could automatically validate your details and send you a new key is a good idea. It would take the work out of it for developers while simultaneously offering greater support to players. If I somehow lost my registration info for Manamon and Aaron refused to replace my key - he replaced my Paladin key no problem, by the way - I would immediately and without a backward glance simply stop playing Manamon and stop supporting the developer. This is true for any other game I pay a fair amount for and expect good support from.
Now I'm going to get personal to Manamon for a moment. I hope this doesn't offend, but I think it ought to be said.
Aaron, just a thought. If you don't want to add to the game anymore, don't want to support it anymore except for the fixing of bugs, then why exactly do you think you still deserve forty bucks from everyone who hasn't gotten the game yet? When the game was new, and we thought you might address a lot of your balance and other concerns, forty bucks was both a purchase and something of a promise of faith. "We're giving you this money because we expect that it's paying both for the game and for that game's continued improvement". And then the majority of that improvement never came. Most manamon are unbalanced in some fashion. Moves can't be taught except by level-up and a couple of niche items. Some items, attacks and manamon are utterly broken and simply not worth using. The script is littered with literally hundreds of spelling and grammar errors. There is virtually no post-game. Trading or battling requires a lot of business with port forwarding which is poorly explained in the manual and rather unfriendly to those who don't know what they're doing. There is no metagame to speak of and probably few to no online battles occurring. For me, at least, I view this as a broken promise of sorts. It wasn't a promise you explicitly made, but one you implicitly did by charging that price for your game. I will never suggest that people crack the game or try and steal keys or whatever - that's not ethical - but if you really don't have the time, the desire or the inclination, or dare I say even the skill, to make this game better than it is, why not abandon it, or drop its price significantly, that way people who still wish to enjoy it can do so at a reduced price, with the understanding that this is essentially as good as it gets? I really can't stress this enough.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1