At the time of writing, it’s now the 25th of April, 2017. Only five more days till the end of April and a week until the release of the latest DLC, 3C3C1D119440927, for PS4 and PC. And yet, we in South East Asia, Hong Kong and even South Korea haven’t seen any update on whether NieR Automata is going to be available on our Steam storefront anytime soon.
The question that is on everyone’s mind is simple:
Why?
Is it because of Piracy? Maybe. The folks at 3DM could crack DRM fast if they can find an exploit. But punishing all the other countries simply for that is silly. In fact, Automata haven’t been cracked since the initial launch on Steam. Even after selling a combined sale of a million copies. Surely that’s not the reason.
And to say that “this region might not sell that well” is also quite silly. Combining the total of all the SEA region countries in the top 20 countries on Steam is equivalent to the number of US users, give or take a few thousands users. Not to mention that since the game is getting a lot of good reviews, people are generally interested in this title but to find that they can’t buy it via the normal means may turn them off from buying it all together. Isn’t that profit loss for both publisher and developers?
Surely there’s a valid reason for this, right? Problems with Currency conversion? Language implementation? Or maybe they just forgot about us? Who knows when this might end. We’re not even sure if this might end positively or negatively either and I do hate to bring up the similarities between this and Metal Gear Rising which is also not available in Asia, had the same problems AND radio silence weeks into its release on Steam 3 years ago.
So to close this off, maybe we’ll get some news on weather or not the game is releasing here in the coming days but Square Enix & PlatinumGames keeping mum on this matter is quite worrying. Personally, I suggest waiting for an official statement but experiences has led me to believe that buying a key or playing it on PS4 is better than waiting for nothing. Your choice really.
*Disclaimer: Please note that this post is reflective of the author’s opinion on this matter, but does not necessarily represent the other writers (on this site) opinion on this.