South African here to ask a question that doesnt seem to have been asked yet

General Discussion General Discussion
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First of all, as stated, I too am in a country that does not have access to this great game! (South Africa) I would really like to support this game and buy a founders pack and receive all the rewards that come with it, however for reasons that are obvious i cannot.

SO, the question i want to ask and hopefully get an official answer is quite simple and should hopefully help many people in the same boat as me.

NOTE: This has NOTHING to do with VPN nor any work around to play the game before it is available for my region.

My question is simple, If i have a family member, who is in a country (UK) that has access to the game, and have him buy me a key which i will then hold onto for however long it takes, on a notepad. Once the game releases in my region (South Africa) will i then be able to use said key to play the game at that point?

I did already take it up with Amazon support and they seemed positive it would be possible and all founders rewards would be intact upon login months or even a year after launch. (I did ask)

Steam support gave this reply:

"My apologies for the delay in reply.

We can not provide a specific answer to this question, as we are not the developer of this game and do not produce or distribute these keys.

We can explain; however, that in general, the keys for game activations - are registered licenses of games that are patented by the game developer in each region individually, in accordance with regional patent laws.

The extent of regional restriction of each game license may vary. In our experience, you may not be able to play the game outside of its license legal registration or you may experience particular complications with connecting to servers, tracking achievements and/or receive awards.

We advise you to contact the game developer for additional information regarding their product.

Please, let us know if we can clarify anything else."

I would also like to ask about If Amazon is working with Smilegate to open more regions up in the future and if you see any reason why the game might not release in my region at all. (Im asking this on the chance someone has insight on a reason my region may never be opened up.)

As a final note, I apologize if this or parts of my question were already asked, however i did comb through many pages of the forum before i asked.

Edit: some clarification.

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I don’t see why it wouldn’t work but only IF AGS were the publishers when/if it’s released for your region. Don’t take my word as law though I could very well be wrong.

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I’ll do that, Thanks for the reply. could you elaborate on the publisher part though?

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If a company other than Amazon obtain publishing rights to LA for South Africa it means any and all codes bought through Amazon wouldn’t work with the other company. It’s the same as people who bought founders packs on NA/EU release won’t be able to use them on the JP,KR or RU servers due to them having different publishers.

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If the game were to be released in your reign I’m sure they would sell founders packs made for that region, as the current release of the game was made specially for the Markets it is in. If I were u I would wait for an official release in my region and wait to see who the publisher is. I believe there are already 2 or 3 other publishers as well as Amazon.

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In Russia the game is on Game Center which is like steam but a different program entirely and the game is published not by Amazon. Steam and Amazon have nothing to do with the Japanese versions as well. So if the game were to go to South America who knows what platform it would be on and who would publish it!

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Hmm i see. That could pose an issue, however if that did arise the code remains unused and i could simply give it away to someone in a country it works in or sell it to someone I know overseas.

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This is the ultimate hope, however if someone new does not and smilegate gives amazon the rights i doubt the founders packs would make a return for people to purchase it. That and im sure Amazon is responsible for its release in the western market, i could be wrong though. That said i dont see it making much sense for the devs to give someone else publishing rights to the same English version Amazon has as it is more likely they would just extend the offer to Amazon.

If they dont however, as i said above it would not be hard to either give or sell the key to a friend that can use it and then buy a new one

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I appreciate the replies, Its given me many extra things to think about and shown me things i did not consider.

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I was looking forward to buying the Founder’s Pack and joining in on the launch hype. This situation for South Africa (and many other countries) really blows. I have no intention to even attempt “workarounds” - that’s just asking for an account ban in the near future.

I’ll stick to my other games for now, at least PoE has an actual South African gateway and the 3.17 patch looks fantastic. I can only hope that when AGS and Smilegate get their act together, they will make use of the AWS South Africa region to host. Likely wishful thinking on my part, I’d still be happy to deal with latency playing on EU.

Now that the game has western localization, all that needs to happen is them sorting out the publishing to enable more global access to their game. If and when that happens, it would be nice of them to allow Founder’s Pack purchases for a limited time in newly added regions. No need to treat us like third rate citizens :slight_smile:

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I do hope for this, I really do.