At the time of writing, South Park: A Fractured But Whole isn’t appearing for Australians on Steam through the website, app or on mobile phones — and when we do try to forcibly load the store page, we’re being told that it’s not available for Australians.
A user reported overnight that the Australian store listing for The Fractured But Whole had vanished. The game hasn’t been rated by the Classification Board yet, and there was no word on Ubisoft’s social media channels about any changes to the game’s release in Australia. Additionally, Australians can also still view a listing for the game on Ubisoft’s Uplay store.
The Fractured But Whole is still viewable on Ubisoft’s Australian page too, complete with the December 6 release date. The link through to the Uplay listing is broken, but that is probably unrelated given the earlier Uplay link.
Searching for the game on Steam, however, is proving troublesome. If I try searching through the website while logged into my Steam account, I’m told that “this item is currently unavailable in your region” or that nothing was found, like so.
If I log out of Steam, I’m able to see The Fractured But Whole’s store page. But as you can see for yourselves, the prices are listed without any currency denominations.
And if I use the Steam app on my mobile, I’m not able to see a listing for the game whatsoever. Adding “?cc=au” to the end of the URL for Fractured But Whole’s Steam listing returns a “this item is currently unavailable in your region” page. You can also go to SteamDB and use the “Install” button (top right of the page) to force the Steam app to load the Fractured But Whole’s store page, which also brings up the item unavailable warning.
I’ve reached out to Ubisoft Australia to confirm whether this is the sign of something more dire, or whether it’s just a little snafu and that the game will reappear soon. If we hear anything back or the situation changes, we’ll keep you posted.
Comments
24 responses to “South Park The Fractured But Whole Goes Missing On Steam”
Has it appeared on any other Australian services? I think XBOX One mentioned it via Stick of Truth by accident. I was actually questioning whether or not it was getting an Australian release.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the publisher pulling the old ‘let’s make a controversy to pump up sales’ trick.
Games and hype and marketing has been a big discussion point of late.
This game’s predecessor and others like it knowingly and successfully played the Classification system of this country into its PR campaign.
Less ‘it’s the game Australia doesn’t want you to play!!’ and more ‘we really really really need to actually make some money on this license, let’s poke the censorship beehive a bit in the foreign markets’.
You’re probably right. After all, the previous game got censored so why not use that to drive people to buy the sequel
Because it’s a fallacy.
Or do we just see fit to dump on one dude like the No Man’s Sky bloke, instead of a big entity like this?
What? I can see it being called manipulation or a dodgy practice, but how is it a fallacy?
Woah there, if Ubisoft did this and it was evident they did, then hells yes we dump……but it’s a theory.
Remember the Watchdog downgrade debacle, the unplayable AC nightmare? They had to pay the piper eventually (as much as a AAA does lol)
The NMS thing? Ho boy.
I am pretty sure that’s exactly *not* what’s happening.
This exactly. I was actually waiting to see how they’d play this, pretty sure it’s not over yet.
Xbox Store has never had the listing even though it shows up in other regions with the SOT included
Oddly you can pre order the stick of truth, or its in the pre order section but just mentions it’s only available In a bundle sooooo still broken
Eh, will buy a non censored key like I did for the last one.
With the Australia tax and puritan enforcement brigade both still operating in full force, learning to proxy is an essential survival skill for any free thinking Australian resident.
As much as I hate to say it, this is how its supposed to be. There are plenty of games unavailable on XB/PSN because they’re not yet given a classification rating, yet they’re free-for-all on Steam because nobody cares. Its only big publishers that abide by this, still console owners miss out on a number of awesome indie titles as a result.
A better option would be to leave the place-holder for the title up but remove the option to buy until classification is given.
Or, y’know, the classification system getting fixed.
Exactly.
Others are required to follow the law, and do so, to do business in this country. It’s simply how things are.
I thought IARC was supposed to sort this stuff out.
Should that mean Australians should be geo-blocked from pre-ordering through Uplay too?
No, but then why did the Australian games industry sign up to IARC?
Something – as I understood it – that was able to cater to situations exactly like this.
Therefore, ball’s still in the publisher/dev’s court. Confused now!
Its that “should” word thats the key part here.. games (and other media) should have a rating before its put up for sale, it should apply to both AAA and indie titles and for Steam (and uplay) to sell in the country, they should abide by that requirement… thats not to say that its fair and just and thousands (millions!) will go around the block by importing on their own.
This is where a review on our classification system needs to be done (again), its not just the 18+ rating we got (or did we?), its that our current system can’t cope with the sheer volume of indie titles getting released on a daily basis – nor can indie devs afford the cost of submitting classification for their title. A better system needs to be put in place such as developer-assigned ratings like they use elsewhere in the world.
At present IARC is just for web and mobile games, so it wouldn’t apply here.
Also, I suspect that IARC ratings would generally be more conservative than the ones currently handed out by the classification board: I imagine the government would prefer a few game developers to pay for a classification review to reduce their game’s rating than for an objectionable game be accidentally given a legally binding classification.
In fairness, it’s not even out for a few months, does it really matter? Plenty of.time for it to be classified and added.
Ah the internet- Designed to bring us together, and instead, the corporations try to use it to segregate us.
Need to re-play Stick of Truth. Thanks to backwards compatibility and Xbox One store lack of region protection, set Xbox One to US region, reboot, insert stick of truth, download US region SKU from the MS Store servers, set back to Australia, reboot, no censorship!
Only downside is due to being a different SKU, your 360 cloud saves don’t work.
So Steam recognize Australia as a region but doesnt recognize our currency…
i honestly dont understand why we still bother using the OFLC/ACB and just uses Europe’s PEGI system for all our Classifications (books, movies, movies,TV, Games etc)
Because that would just be common sense and we can’t have that here in aus.
At some point I’d love to see a game with some tasteful nudity – you know, Renaissance statues and paintings and the like – and then have an American version where that stuff is obnoxiously blurred out.
The tender embrace of two lovers, except in the American version where they’re talking about how much they like cheeseburgers and monster trucks and freedom.
Any update?