More often than not games are released on the PlayStation Store in the US but completely by-pass the Australian store. It often leaves people scratching their heads — how hard can it be to release a digital game in more than one country? Sony explains why.
Posting on the PlayStation Blog, Jawad Ashraf from the PS Store team explained that the reason for the discrepancy between the US and EU Store (which would also be applicable to the AU store) is in licensing and localisation work.
“Licensing, market and a host of other business and non-business decisions all play a part,” he wrote.
“What is often forgotten is the EU consists of not just one or two countries — it includes a variety (36!), meaning a lot more localising must be done [editor’s note: in the case of Australia, the game doesn’t need to be localised into a completely different language, but there are some differences]. Certain games also retain licenses only in certain territories or have expired rights.
“There’s generally so many factors that can often lead to games being delayed or totally cancelled for specific regions, and sometimes this cannot be helped.”
In some territories the cost of getting a game classified is relatively high and if a publisher doesn’t believe they will be able to make a reasonable profit within that territory, they do not bother spending the money distributing and marketing that game.
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