Deus Ex: European Revolution

Overnight it emerged that PC versions of the game would have a form of region locking. Retail copies from the UK won’t work anywhere else, for example, torpedoing the long held practice of shopping around for the best deals. While this could easily be considered a dick move in its own right, the real kicker is that the information only trickled out on the Eidos forums last night (and was quickly picked up by Rock, Paper, Shotgun), and even retailers were unaware that the game they had been taking preorders for was subject to such limitations.

The fact that the forum moderators aren’t actually employees just made matters worse, with people being redirected to another thread that stated PC versions would work anywhere. We expect to see an official statement emerge sometime soon, but the damage seems to already be done.

We can confirm that the Australian retail copies activate via Steam and come tagged ‘Worldwide Edition’ - not that it is entirely clear what that means. It does appear that digital distribution outlets have non-region locked codes (although Impulse at least is restricting sales to the US, despite frustratingly giving pricing in AUD to Australian users). The game uses Steam, so PC copies that will work, be they digital or retail, won’t be playable here until the 25th of August, two days after the US launch. Even this unlock date only turned up on Steam overnight - until now it has just said ‘August’.

What makes the entire situation so frustrating is that a lot of people deliberately hunted out the best pre-order deal, well before the news of region locking emerged. There are tales on the Eidos forums of people cancelling pre-orders from months ago and being unable to locate region appropriate versions of the collectors/augmented editions.

Even if we leave the larger issue of region locking aside for the moment, pulling this kind of move a week out from launch shows a massive disregard for customers. Squeenix has been more than happy to push pre-orders for months, and broke up pre-order bonuses in such a way that diehard fans actively searched out the best deal. A simple ‘and by the way, we are region locking the game in this way’ when announcing the big pricetag editions for pre-order months ago could have eliminated the shock factor that some people are encountering as they realise pre-orders need to be cancelled and a new source for the game found.

Deus Ex is being distributed locally by Namco Bandai, who we have contacted for a statement. For now at least, anyone who has preordered a retail copy from the UK and hasn't had their preorder cancelled (It seems that UK retailers are now actually aware of the issue) should probably get in touch and check.

Also be aware that sites selling Deus Ex: Human Revolution steam codes online could well be doing it with regional European versions that won’t work in Australia. Generally speaking buying such codes is always a risk, in this case it should its likely to result in no game at all.