‘Ubisoft Expands Game Catalog on Steam’.

This headline was posted on the Steampowered website on the 1st of April 2008. Worldwide Steam users hearts started beating a little faster to finally be able to play those excellent Ubisoft games through Steam. Already we could see ourselves playing Far Cry or the cult hit Beyond Good and Evil. The accompanying news post even promised us 40 Ubisoft games, only to be told in the second sentence that the deal was for Canada and the United States only (http://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/1512/). That made Ubisoft yet another publisher like Atari that chose to raise prices or neglect the rest of the world.

An idea was born out of the desperation and frustration for unfair global distribution. What would be more ironic then to use a service made by Valve to show all game companies and fellow gamers that we really want these games in a fair manner on Steam? And so this Steam community group “Rest of World” (RoW) was created, on the exact same day that Ubisoft released their games to North America.

The mission statement on the front page was simple: “We would like to show the amount of people who would have bought your games if you made them available in all countries, used the same pricing worldwide and offered the localized versions available in retail.” How were we going to accomplish such a task? Get the help of websites and members of the group to spread the word about the mission. As helpful as the Valve community is we got an overwhelming response and saw the member count skyrocket. Only two months after we created Rest of World we were counting 6200 members. We also felt the need to stay polite and positive towards all concerned in this matter. Slandering the publishers and Valve would only hurt sales and the stance from publishers towards gamers. It would accomplish exactly the opposite of what we want: more games and what Valve and the publishers want: us buying more games.

And here we are a year later. We would like to provide you with a quick overview what happened this year.

Let’s start with the positive:

+ We were able to reach 11,540 members and get the word out about the unfair global distribution. We want to thank you and all the websites that helped us out reaching so many people! Simply amazing!
+ Ubisoft started selling their games worldwide (excluding certain regions unfortunately).
+ EA’s catalog went from North America only to worldwide (again excluding certain regions) in just two days.
+ THQ started selling games in Australia and New Zealand.
+ Valve promised and started delivering on the promise to “fix” European prices that were unfair due to the currency change.
+ Some answers as to why a publisher/developer can’t or won’t release games worldwide were given by industry insiders.

So is there no more need to show publishers that we want fair global distribution? Yes, There’s still the need for this and other groups:

-Certain games or publishers catalogs (Atari) still aren’t available for the whole world. They might be available for more regions but not all (Ubisoft, Rockstar, Epic, etc).
-There are still a lot of games that are priced higher in certain regions. Some prices are even higher than the suggested retail price.
-There still is no way for German users to download uncensored content while competing platforms allow them to do so.
- There are still more localized game versions available in retail then on Steam.
- While we haven’t focused much on it ourselves as it isn’t really in the scope of the Rest of World group we believe that adding extra DRM on top of Steam also hurts sales and customer satisfaction.

Those are some of the highlights and downfalls from this year. While we will never know for sure, we like to think that we did make a difference with this group. We can only hope that this year we can resolve all outstanding issues and live in a world where fair global distribution is more than a dream of 11,540+ Steam users!