EA, LucasArts and BioWare collectively hates Australia, Latin America and Asia…

Good news everyone! I just pre-ordered a copy of the Collector’s Edition of Star Wars: The Old Republic!

I’m sure everyone concerned has learned that only a list of 20 or so countries from North America and Europe get to pre-order the game and will be the first ones to have access to it while the rest of the world has to wait for an undisclosed period of time. After all these years, more waiting… but worse! A lot of people will be waiting while people from the luckier countries or people like me who pre-ordered copies from overseas get to play it while they don’t.

I woke up this morning and was checking my news-feeds on my newly bought Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, just chilling in bed since I’m on my mid-year break from uni… and there it was, the big pre-order announcements all over the net for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Hell yeah! I was excited and immediately checked for information about the Australian release of the game… wait… wait… what? I can’t seem to find anything relating to Australia… oh.

By this time I was pretty damn PISSED OFF with the whole fiasco unfolding in front of me, as was a lot of people posting their rage posts on the official TOR forum. Of course, despite being pissed off about it, I wasn’t surprised at all by what was happening. Again Australia, New Zealand and other regions and countries are being shafted. It just makes me feel even more justified for not bothering to buy Australian versions of video games because there’s just no point any more when shit like this can happen.

After a moment I collected my thoughts and with the help of Jeff, came up with a plan. By this time Amazon had already sold out of their pre-order allotments of the game, however I was able to pre-order through GameStop but it’ll apparently take up to 2 days for them to email me my early access codes, bah!

I’m not going to bother going on a huge rant about this, I’m just pissed off that EA, LucasArts and BioWare can’t even manage a simultaneous release in western countries at the very least. But what makes matters worse is that there’s a good chance that people in countries not selected for pre-order are going to be waiting A VERY LONG TIME for The Old Republic to be released in their regions.

If my hype level wasn’t as high as it was for The Old Republic before this morning, I probably would have said “nope, that’s it, I’m out” and wouldn’t have bothered to buy the game at all… I’m sure there are people out there who have taken that route which is a shame but understandable.