Official statement from a european

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.

Originally Posted by Gorath
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.

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.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
….
As for why it isn't more readily available digitally, that comes down to dtp's incompetence….

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

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

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

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!