Penny Arcade Adventures Xbox 360. Region locked

Irateoffshoregamer

Hi big fan of the comic and was looking forward to downloading the game on Xbox live. Purchased the points online, and prepared to download and lo and behold according to the marketplace it's not available in my location. I'm currently in the staying in the Philippines and have a US live account. M$oft determines the region basing on the ip address I'm logging into. As much as I wanted to play this on the xbox I'm stuck with the pc version. Why region lock the game when most games in live arcade are available in all regions. Sigh I wasted money on M$oft points, might as well use it for more rockband songs.

NotASenator

I'm pretty sure this is MS policy, not HotHead's decision. They've done everything they can to make sure as many people as possible can get the game.

Willeth

Fairly sure that this is Microsoft's decision, not PA/Hothead's. I am sure that they want it in as many people's hands as possible, should they wish to buy it. If that isn't the case, then the following post is complete bullshit:

If your IP region doesn't match your registered reason then you can't download a lot of content - this has been the case for a while. While they seem to be perfectly fine with you purchasing addon content (for some reason), you will run into difficulty with this kind of situation.

Your best bet is to focus your complaints toward Microsoft rather than Penny Arcade and Hothead, through the usual Support channels. I can guarantee that you'll pretty much get the standard 'ooh, it's licencing issues' stuff, though.

EDIT: Dammit Crook. Verbosity rears its ugly head once again.

NotASenator

To be fair, your's was better worded.

HH Vlad

I can officially say we have nothing to do with those kinds of policies.

swotr

I'm from the UK and currently living in Bangkok. I've run into the same problem whilst downloading the trial version: "this item is not available for download from your current location". Whilst this is the case for some items on XBL, I have to disagree with Willeth saying it happens a lot - it's actually very rare.

Demos that I could not download were Sega Rally and The Club, leading me to believe it was a Sega related issue. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time that an arcade game is unavailable for download, and since I download every trial game, I'm afraid this may be setting a worrying precedent.

I see little sense in trying to confront M$ over this as I have more pressing matters like the death of my Xbox Elite which I have to pay $140 to send to the UK as they wont accept it in Singapore. However if developers are worried that customers with money to spend on their product are unable to do so because of some arbitrary policy, I'd like to suggest that they maybe they could get an answer from M$.

HH Vlad

I think we will do just that.

swotr

HH Vlad: Thank you for taking these comments on board. It's good to know that someone with some influence will raise this issue with M$. Looking forward to playing the game at some point!

GisliKonrad

I feel I need to raise this topic from the dead. I live in Iceland and had gotten used to the idea that I couldn't download Penny Arcade Episode 1 for my XBox because of region restrictions. I don't play games on PC anymore and therefore I haven't downloaded the game there.

Now, I saw that Episode 2 was out and decided to try to download it for the XBox and to my surprise, I didn't get an error message.

That brings me to the point of this topic ressurection... Why is Episode 1 region locked and Episode 2 not?

HH Vlad

We have no idea. Do you see EP1 now as well? This is a MS issue that we tried to get resolved but never got a final word.

GisliKonrad

Yeah... Ep1 is still there but I get the "not available in your region" error when I try to download it.

jaikai

Hi,

I'm having the same situation here. I downloaded Ep2 but I can't download Ep1.
I live in Chile (that's southamerica ).

HH Vlad

We should have a response to if anything can be done by the end of the week.