Earlier this afternoon it was revealed that Star Wars: The Old Republic would not be available in Australia at launch. Now we have an statement from Bioware stating that they “cannot commit to any timeframe” for the game’s release outside of the US and Europe.
The statement reads as follows:
To all of our fans outside of North America and Europe:
Today we’ve announced the pre-order details for the initial launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and as you may now know, we’ve taken the difficult but necessary decision to limit our initial launch supply for the game. BioWare and LucasArts are completely focused on building an exceptional game and an exceptional game service to go with it. We decided to constrain our launch capacity to ensure we deliver a great experience to every player.
Part of the reason this decision was made was because of the overwhelming demand for The Old Republic, and we’re humbled by that level of excitement and anticipation. We fully intend to deliver to you an amazing game when we expand our service post-launch, but right now we cannot commit to any timeframe for when that may happen. As soon as we have more information about additional launches in more territories, we’ll let you know.
We are committed to delivering Star Wars: The Old Republic to BioWare and Star Wars fans around the world, and to growing a truly global community.
Thanks to Denaz and The Cracks for the tip.
DENAz
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 7:59 PMSo disapointed! I had such faith in Bioware too, they were one of my favorite devs.
You used to be cool Bioware!
Aidan
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:03 PMI can sort of understand their position, it would be frustrating if too many people overloaded the servers in the initial rush.
But c’mon. They’ve had years to plan for the launch, they’ve had years of warning that it’s going to be popular, and they’ve had years to invest in the server architecture and to develop a service that will work well no matter how many people choose to use it.
Restricting who can play the game makes them look either insensitive or incompetent.
Alinos
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:26 PMI could understand If we were a week out and they said this we are months out any possible issues can be rectified in that time
Lord Crumplebottom
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:04 PMHow would they know what the demand is when it only just went on pre-sale?
Load of bollocks.
lambomann007
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:27 PMProbably from people signing up to test the game.
Lord Crumplebottom
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:37 PMSigning up for a free testers position and people committed to buying and playing the game are 2 completely different things. You can I can sign up too 150x with different ‘profiles’ to improve our chances at being testers.
Facebook really doesn’t have 70mil people on it either :)
Pakka
Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 3:16 PMOf corse they don’t, more like 750 million users.
lambomann007
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:05 PMI’ll probably just end up ordering the game from zavvi anyway, they’re selling it for about $50 aud, which is nearly $40 cheaper than what EB are going to sell it for. It sucks that we won’t have aussie servers at launch though.
Mic
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 10:31 PMYou’re assuming ti’ll have Aussie-based servers at all. WoW has ‘Aussie’ servers, which are just US servers with Aus timezones ingame. I wouldn’t expect much different.
lambomann007
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 6:40 AMIt doesn’t? Oh good, so it doesn’t really matter if I import it.
lambomann007
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 6:46 AM“It doesn’t?” Should probably not be there, also I probably shouldn’t be posting this early in the morning…
:P
thejiveman
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:08 PMWell thats a bit piss weak in the fair dinkum department.
Stinkface
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 4:07 AMI think that’s the best way of putting it anyone has come up with so far.
Milton
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:27 PMthat statement was heroic
Cameron
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:08 PMSeriously. F*** EA. This is a goddamn pre-order. They won’t even take our money for a pre-order, how are they going to treat us when the game actually launches, and you know has to be supported and all that. F*** EA.
OzHuski
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 1:16 AMIts Bioware, not EA who have posted this and confirmed that is what they are doing.
sparhawk0
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:10 PMSo apparently the problem is we want the game too much!
I could almost live with it if there was a commitment to a special “We’re sorry” package. Clearly, though, they’re going with a “you’ll take whatever scraps we decide to give you – if we feel like doing so at all – and you should be grateful for us considering you that much” approach.
Boo on you, Bioware. You can bit my flabby human arse from here on. Your “growing … global community” just shrank by one.
The Cracks
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:10 PMI think I might refuse to order it from overseas. As much as I want this game (desperately), Bioware/EA have just screwed themselves.
NegativeZero
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:55 PMUnless you’ve also got an overseas credit card, you’ll probably struggle to actually create a game account anyway, since they’ll want to know where to collect their montly pound of flesh.
Zidane
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:12 PMThis is just so damn lame. I’ve been waiting for this for so long, as have many others, and now we got to wait longer than the rest of the world!?
I probably won’t get this now unless they have actual australian servers. I was going to make this my last mmo ever, but now I might just end with wow and end it there.
Ryan
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:13 PMBiggest anticlimax ever.
Klutar
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:17 PMI am disappoint
Dean McCraw
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:17 PMWow, now I’m really glad I preordered from Amazon. I have to say though this is one of the largest f***ups I’ve seen from a game company in a long time.
Tom
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:21 PMAlso read: this game isn’t coming to Australia, although, if we did release it, we’d have to censor it into become Care Bears Online.
Luke
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:21 PMThis is utterly ridiculous. Are they saying they wont have enough digital versions available to download? I mean come on, seriously? Poor excuse really.
Glenn
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:32 PMIt’s not about the physical copies, it’s about the load on the servers. No point launching a game if no-one can play it because the servers simply cannot cope with the stress at launch.
Probably why they’re also offering early access codes, so they can ease people onto the servers instead of unleashing the flood gates.
Luke
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:25 PMAfter dumping $100 million into the devolepment of the game I would be blown away if they had not set up enough servers to handle the expected amount of players. Even if a lot of those servers are temporary and to be rolled in at a later date. Besides that its not very good business sense.
Jake
Sunday, August 7, 2011 at 12:13 AMLoad on servers? Are you nuts? There are 300 million people in the US alone, there are only 20 million in Australia. Adding Australia to the launch would have NO NOTICIBLE EFFECT ON SERVER PERFORMANCE.
The only rational reasons for not including Australia in the launch all revolve around money and publishing/distribution rights.
codemonkey
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:36 PMDepartment.PR.ScrewUp = True;
Uncle Avvy
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 11:30 AMif(Department.PR.ScrewUp == true)
{
System.out.println(“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu”) ;
ragequit(0) ;
}
codemonkey
Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 5:42 PMI <3 U
Gumby
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:43 PMOne reason i was looking forward to this game was that it would be the first MMO i would have played from launch. I thought it would be interesting to be there from the start.
Bioware. I am disappoint.
michael
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:47 PMI agree with alot of you guys, I remember looking at lucasartsbioware.com many years ago with excitement, then signing up on day 1 for a swtor.com account + beta test (of course australians were never chosen for this).
I’m also not going to really bother with this game/ getting american friends to order for me, I think it’s just a poor decision.
Devlin
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:49 PMAussies can still pre-order the game from amazon.
Shinkada
Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 12:05 AMYou’re missing the important part where they likely wouldn’t accept an Australian credit card.
Nigel
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:54 PMSo Bioware has just give us the bird and are going to tease us with the game.
NegativeZero
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:55 PMComplete and utter bullshit. I was going to be a day 1 purchaser for this, but now I think I’ll skip it – they don’t want my business.
V3N0M
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:02 PMBioware think of what you are doing… Blizzard is once again laughing at you! You are letting Wow win!!! Even Wow had Global Launch.. Hello MATCH IT!!!
Rob
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:05 PMThis is not the game you are looking for.
Hawkules
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 12:39 AMI laughed, nicely done sir.
Matt
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 8:53 AM+1 Lolz!
Brenny
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:05 PMAustralia & NZ always comes last. It’s not like we have a big population to slow down the servers and we speak english so no localisation is needed.
andy
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:06 PMwho gives a sh*t if we can still preorder on amazon. We would have to play on laggy as F*** US servers australia isnt exactly the hardest market to accommidate for either.
Luke
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:34 PMIn almost every mmo, we play on the US servers. For them to actually host Aussie servers may be asking a bit much. Usually they are just official Oceanic servers that are still hosted in the US. Cant see anything different happening with this.
Steve0410
Friday, July 22, 2011 at 12:59 AMBecause it’s not cheap?
There aren’t enough English speaking players in the Oceanic region to justify the cost of local servers.
Even look at WoW (which I doubt old republic will match in numbers), there are maybe 2-3 ‘healthy’ Oceanic game servers (each maybe 5-10,000 population) and a large chunk of them are SEA players anyway.
You can’t limit based on server location or you’re cutting out huge numbers of players from the pool.
Shinkada
Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 12:08 AMI agree with you, but small fallacy; WoW’s Oceanic servers do not make up the entire Oceanic playerbase, in fact I doubt it’s even a quarter. Most Australians play on the American servers because, well, there are no AU servers, really. You’d NEED the low ping to make up for the things an AU-only server would lose out on, like higher levels of competition since let’s face it what few Australians play games generally suck arse at them.
TG
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 9:06 PMStrange that they’ve pretty much admitted that thier network infrastructure is going to be good enough for the 200mil+ people in the US and theo ther 200mil+ in the Eurozone, but the 20mil+ from Australia in NZ is just too much. Lame to the max.