Steam Mixup With Australian Release Of Borderlands, Censored Version

When I went to bed last night my computer was eagerly pre-loading Borderlands from Steam in advance of the game's release here simultaneous with the United States; at least I thought the release was simultaneous with the US-- the Steam page for Borderlands had a countdown timer that I impatiently watched, assuring me that I'd have my copy today. When I woke up, sadly, no dice. Apparently twenty minutes before the game was set to be unlocked and unencrypted, Steam had a wake-up call and realized they had flagged an incorrect date for Australia. We weren't supposed to get the game on the 27th, but the 30th.

Needless to say, I was a bit ticked off personally. I didn't know that the game's release date was incorrect on Steam since Steam was where I pre-ordered it and I (apparently erroneously) expected them to have correct information about their titles. But no, the release date all along has been the 30th, and Steam simply jumped the gun. Their forums have been predictably on fire since this happened, with lots of closed/deleted threads and bans flinging out left and right.

While this has happened in the past (a game is released in the US before Australia gets it) I am usually able to get around things-- I still have a US bank account, credit card and mailing address, and these things come in handy when I want to buy a game online that isn't available in this country yet. Usually nothing more than a check on the IP address happens, which I can get around by connecting through a proxy. In the case of Borderlands, however, this usual trick is not enough for me. In the end I was able to get my copy activated and playing but it required a frankly dumb degree of fiddling with the Steam client to happen. And if it wasn't frustrating enough, apparently somehow Steam sent an incorrectly censored version of it to Australian players-- this was a definite error which was fixable, but it begs the question of what's going on with this game over at Valve headquarters.

I was glad that I was able to get it playing, but annoyed at the lengths through which Gearbox Software tried to stand in the way. Usually different release dates come down to licensing issues, which is fine, but don't penalize the people who got legitimate copies early. That sort of thing only leads to frustration, and for a lot of people frustration leads to piracy. Mistakes happen and people are only human, but while I'm glad I've got my copy working, I don't think some token of good will would be out of line to look for from Gearbox about all of this; the issue pretty much only affected people who pre-ordered and you don't want to upset the people so excited about your game they bought it before it was even live.