Official statement from a european
 

I refuse to buy this game! I do not want to spend any more time looking for ways to acquire this game.

Thank you for your attention.

Good grief, that's all a tad melodramatic don't you think?

I come from Australia and had no trouble at all just by looking on ebay. But I think my enjoyment of the first game made it certain that I'd find a way to purchase the sequel no matter how hard it might be.

Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to find. Otherwise, your loss mate. :P
The game is solid fun.

At least your reason isn't the low quality browser diablo clone still in beta with stuttering flash called drakensang online. I've tried it and it's a full letdown and stabbing fans in their back:
http://drakensangonline.bigpoint.com

Hmm. How is that relevant to whether or not one should pick up River of Time or not?

Radon Labs went bankrupt and the rights to Drakensang were purchased by BigPoint. I get that and I also fully empathise and understand fans concerns.
I don't want to play the online game either.

But I'm not going to let that situation get in the way of my enjoyment of The River of Time…that would just be…silly.

I refute!!!

I don't understand why a Euro game is so difficult to get in Europe! The English version is relatively easy to obtain here in the states, if you don't need a box, and has been on some really cheap sales too.

Starting this coming week, Drakensang, the Complete Saga will be sold in U.S. shops as well. Surely, there's an equivalent across the pond?

That's news to me, thanks for the heads up Drithius.

Perhaps I'll still be able to pick up a boxed english package that contains Phileasson's Secret yet. ;) Let's know how much the whole saga is going for when you see it in stores.

The only thing about the distribution of Drakensang is that … someone (someone who should know it) said to me that no-one wants it. On the distribution side, I mean.
That person is out of reach for me, so I just don't know more about it - although IÄ'd really like to hear the full background story of it …

On the German role-playing convention RPC I managed to get my certificate of my PE signed by Mr. Beyreuther himself. I thoroughly thanked him for making such a wonderful game. But he said - and the sound of disappointment was there, I believe - that "nobody bought it".

Such a sad end for such a fine franchise !


By the way - I was holding the Platinum Edition in my hands today (Drasa 1 + Drasa 2 + P.S.).

Probably not. The parts of Europe that relies on the English version has been rather Drakensang starved, and even finding a copy has been incredibly hard. To make matters worse, there seem to be limitations on where stores are allowed to ship the game (is that even legal? I don't actually think it is…), so people who live in places like Sweden have had an even harder time getting the game. I tried to order the game from several places until I found a place willing to ship to Sweden. None of the stores offering the game for download offers it here either, and it is probably true for many other countries as well.
Also, none of the regular online stores seem to have the complete saga on their list of upcoming releases.




By the way, there might be a chance of you being able to order the game from play. I've never had any issues with ordering from anyone affiliated with play in the past, while stores that sells their wares through amazon has given me issues before (though apart from Drakensang, I've only had issues with books).

I don't know about in Germany, but here in the US it was not promoted very well at all. If it wasn't for this site, I would never have heard of it. I suspect there are a lot of people who would enjoy this game but simply don't know about it. For example, I see it appealing to fans of Dragon Age: Origins more than Dragon Age 2 does. :p

It's near impossible to find a box copy here and I hate to say it, but not having console ports hurts it as well since they seems to be a pre-requisite these days.

I think there are other things they could do to get it out there more as well, like having it be a deal of the day or weekend deal on Steam or something like that. I think it was marked down during the summer sale but so is everything else so it just sort of gets lost unless you do a daily deal.

I can only advise you to show that you don't like this distribution in the official forums !

My personal rule is : What remains unknown cannot be changed … If dtp for example doesn't know about it, they won't change a thing ! - Plus, they won't even know how much demand is out there !

You could also write to the U.S. distributor and complain … I think it was either THQ or ValuSoft, a daughter company of THQ …

And if you are REALLY hardcore, then try a snail-mail letter !
Because I guess that snail-mail gets much more attention than simple e-mails or forum entries …

The Drakensang games were promoted heavily in Germany. The 2nd game even got a personalized (!) collector's edition. Both games were sold for full price, not the laughable budget price players in other countries were asked to pay.

Distribution problems are typical of medium budget games. A local publisher secures the funding, but he needs foreign partners to cover other regions. If those are unwilling to commit resources to promotion you end like TRoT. This happens to the majority of the Euro-RPGs, for example. Even Risen was hardly available at retail in NA, despite having Koch Media behind them, Europes biggest independent media distributor for games, software and DVDs.
Big publishers could secure worldwide distribution, but the typical Euro-RPG is simply too small for them to care. Anything below a projection of 1M units for full price is simply not worth the effort to start up their big marketing & production machine.

Those problems doesn't apply to Steam where it is region restricted. It's like they want to protect nonexistent retail sales.

This. Although I think to some extent there are some territorial rights or some such that they are obliged to follow. It's all very silly and I wish that sort of thing would go away.

There's also the possibility of doing what CD Projekt did and just selling an international digital version themselves.

Oh, the publisher could sell directly on Steam. Why they don't do it is totally unclear. There are no regional rights to protect - dtp has the worldwide rights. Everybody else gets licensed by them.

They really need to get off their ass and sell their games then. Ditto for Venetica too which isn't even on Steam at all. It's a good game and unlike, say, Piranha Bytes and CD Projekts stuff, dtp's RPGs can easily have a lot of appeal to female gamers as well as male.

Can someone from the US confirm my suspicion? I googled "Drakensang and GamersGate" and found this on the GG website.

There is no buy button on that page and if I go to GG I do not even see this game, but there are reviews for it and it sounds like people have bought this game from them. I would just like to know if GG is hiding this game from people outside the US.

If so it's a bit sneakier than a "Not available in your region" sign.

Yes you can buy it from Gamersgate if you live in the US that is exactly where I bought it from myself.

So they are blocking Asia too? :rolleyes:

GG can only sell in the territories they have the rights to.

Yea, I guess it's blocked here though I would have never known it if I hadn't of googled gamersgate and drakensang. They hide the games that aren't available in my region. It's sneaky, but doesn't raise my blood pressure as much as when I see a "NA region" sign. Hate those freaking things.

It's 2011 and the internet is world wide. Get with the program and take my freaking money.

Ask dtp for that, ask GG.
This is the only way I can think of to get some real answers.

I also fear that they are following an self-fulfilling prophecy : "No-one will buy it.

Yes, but of course no-one will do if you don't promote it !

Another thing I fear is just this : That "the big publishers" have a bias against E.U. games. If you look at the German market, the american games are big, and the european games are just medium, often … This is, I guess, a direct symbol of marketing power, of dominance in the markets.

The third thing that comes to my mind is a simple conspiracy theory (and therefore insane) : The "big ones" try to keep europeans small to suppress competition … Competition would mean less income - and an area can pend only so much on a given "cake" of released games … Keeping others small would therefore keep the income not only at a relatively high level, but also bigger competors would reduce the number of sold "units" => less margins/profits …

Remember, this is just a conspiracy theory made up by me …

The version available from Steam, Gamersgate, Impulse etc comes from ValuSoft (THQ), the US distributor, hence the restrictions. They can hardly distribute into territories they don't have rights for.

The Gamersgate restrictions are trivial to circumvent with a proxy, by the way - that's how I got it.

As for why it isn't more readily available digitally, that comes down to dtp's incompetence (yet again). Rather than look for conspiracies, Alrik, why not ask why one of your local publishers is unable to provide results?

For retail, well, that's pretty easy. Big retail chains have limited space for niche titles, which constricts the market.

In what way has this got something to do with incompetence?

Are you talking about VPNs? Been reading up on them because of these stupid NA restrictions, but I'm hesitant to try it in case it doesn't work and I still get billed.

When it comes to proxies, IPs or anything related to the inner workings of the net I'm a babe lost at sea.

If anyone in the U.S. wants a hardcopy: http://www.gamestop.com/pc/games/dra…ete-saga/92777

Apparently it's a gamestop exclusive… kind of confusing as it doesn't say Xbox 360 on the packaging :P

At least they put the digital version of this game up on Steam and other sites. Poor Venetica isn't even up at all except for one store, Direct2drive and I have never seen it go on sale even once.

dtp licensed it out to Atari in North America. Atari had no problems getting the Witcher games up or NWN2, hell they even put Daggerdale up and I have yet to hear a single nice thing about that game.

They couldn't even be bothered to put a digital download of Venetica up on their own Atari.com.

So yeah, I am going to go with dtp being pretty incompetent. It's almost as if they don't want sales from these games. I don't get it.

I imported my copy from amazon.co.uk a few months ago. Not having played Skyrim I'd say ROT is easily the best RPG of 2011 for me. Before calling DTP a bad publisher consider this. I wanted to buy Skyrim fair and square, after "demoing" it a bit. Turns out, that Skyrim is still blocked in my region on Steam more than a month after release, probably because some douchebags snatched an exclusive deal for eastern european retail release from Bethesda. Now it gets really interesting however. Turns out, that these douchebags have massive delivery difficulties, at least in my country, and the only people, who have gotten Skyrim legally here are the ones that preordered. I can't import the game either, because i don't speak any other eastern european languages and i'm not sure weather an european release is blocked on Steam by these fuckheads or something. Yeah, nice job getting rid of these pesky Eastern European pirates, guys!

I just ordered Drakensang: the Complete Saga from an American eBay seller for 18 euros (including postage). That's certainly not bad for two games and an add-on!