Last week 2K took yet another step to try and revive the flagging fan base for Battleborn by making it available for $US15 in a pretty reasonable Humble Bundle. And as is often the case, they also advertised that some other games would be bundled into the second tier at a later date.
We know what the bonus games are. Problem is, one of them doesn’t seem to be accessible to Australians.
As of yesterday, 2K’s latest Humble Bundle has eight separate items for the second tier: Civilization V, NBA 2K16, the director’s cut of Mafia II, Freedom Force, Freedom Force vs The Third Reich, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a starter skin pack for Battleborn, and Railroad Tycoon 3.
The new games aren’t great. The original Freedom Force has plenty of compatibility issues with modern operating systems, and XCOM Declassified was always the lesser of the modern XCOM titles. But the curious kicker here is Railroad Tycoon 3.
If you search for it through the Steam client, mobile app or the web page, it mysteriously doesn’t appear. And when I tried directly accessing the store URL, I was greeted with this:
If you add “?cc=us” to the end of the URL — the same trick used if you want to check what a game’s listing looks like to those in the United States — the game appears with a price of $US9.99, a 72% user rating and a rather unhelpful warning that the game isn’t compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7. Which doesn’t really augur well for those using Windows 10, or the majority of people on Steam at all.
I emailed 2K’s local PR yesterday, but haven’t heard back at the time of writing. I pinged Humble Bundle as well asking what happens when parts of a bundle are region locked, but didn’t get a reply from them either. I doubt anything nefarious is going on, and it’s not the first time that a Humble Bundle hasn’t been available globally, as was the case with the first Nintendo offering.
Is the onus on 2K to provide a replacement? And what happens if 2K makes the region-locked game available at a later date after the bundle expires? Maybe Humble sends out a Steam key and it works nonetheless. If you bought into 2K’s latest bundle, let us know in the comments!
Update (4:48 PM): MySmilie has kindly replied in the comments that they were able to redeem a code for the game and start downloading, despite being in Australia. It’s still not searchable for Australians on the Steam store, though. I’ve updated the headline to reflect this.
Comments
16 responses to “The 2K Humble Bundle Has A Game That Australians Can’t See”
Just proxy into the states and activate your key.
Didn’t they start adding measures to block that?
If the key is a Russian or otherwise low price market, you will have issues. But if its a global full price key, will work fine.
You should be able to activate the key without making any changes. Its worked like this in the past with other bundle titles not available here – you just can’t buy them direct from the Steam Store (without engaging shenanigans). Same as if someone from America gifted you a copy of Railroad Tycoon. Or Manhunt. >.>
I wonder why Railroad Tycoon 3 isn’t available in Australia. Did it get refused classification because there were some trains that looked underage wearing hardly any carriages?
My uneducated guess: They just didn’t pay for it to go through the classification process. It costs between $890 and $2460 to go through the process. For many games, this would be considered a needless cost for niche titles.
it is available on GOG though which is kind of weird
I bought a retail copy of Railroad Tycoon 3 about 10 years ago from EB games. No problems with classification. It’s an oldie but a personal favourite of mine.
I saw RT3 on the shelf in dick smith for $5 some years back, definitely got a retail release.
I want to say first, I live in Australia, SA if it matters.
I bought the Humble 2k Bundle today, got the Steam code for Railroad Tycoon 3 and was able to get it on Steam successfully. In fact, I’m currently downloading it now with no complications so far.
I agree, I can’t find it in the Steam store, it doesn’t show up, but I can only assume that activating the code in the Steam client SHOULD still work, unless I’m just lucky?
That’s great to know. Let us know if you have any issues running the game, compatibility problems aside.
The game does have some issues running anything from Vista onwards but there are community fixes. A great website for those is http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/rrt3.htm which includes official patches and community fixes, patches, mods and maps
I’m sure I was able to redeem the Humble Key without an issue. Might download it tonight just to see if it runs.
I find you can usually activate those keys, but it was worth asking for verification, a pity they didn’t just come right out and advise that on the page. (Games like that, and from dlh.net you will at the most get forum access from within the steam client – just no local Store or dlc’s pages)
I got bundle and this game is running flawlessly on my PC, windows 10 and a i5-6600k. Forgot how difficult old games can be sometimes. Also claimed the code through steam without any issues.
For posterity – I have claimed, activated, and played the game in question. Needed a fix to play on windows 10 (actually anything newer than windows 7 needs it). Great nostalgia trip!
2k has a few games like this, civcity rome is another, not on steam (aus) but you can buy a key from gmg and it works.