On the weekend Andre happened to show me Sid Meier’s Civilization IV and in particular the Beyond the Sword expansion pack. I immediately decided I wanted to get a copy for myself, having strangely enough, never played any of the series before even though others peoples I know like Ruari have spent way too many hours engrossed in building civilizations.
So apparently the quickest and easiest way to get a copy of the game is through Valve’s Steam service. But lo and behold it seems that 2K Games no longer supports delivery of content to South Africa and doesn’t even offer the game to South African users or make mention of the fact that we live in an unsupported country. Wonderful.
I happened to notice our country code in the game page‘s URL so I tried changing it to the UK and lo and behold, I can now see pricing for the game.
Unfortunately clicking on the Purchase button resulted in a “Game unavailable” message box telling me that “This subscription is not available in your country.”
I ended up waiting until the following day and calling my local BT Games store where I actually picked up a copy of the Sid Meier’s CivilizationIV Complete for less than it was available on Steam. Now I can understand content restrictions but then Valve must not lie to its customers. If you take a look at their Get Steam Now page it clearly states:
Fast access to games: The full Steam library and all future Steam releases are at your fingertips. After you’ve purchased a game, download it immediately and start playing.
So what’s the story Valve, why the misleading advertising?
[tags]Valve,Steam,Civilization IV,South Africa,rant[/tags]