Demiath's Unboxing, Part #21 - Drakensang: The River of Time
6The well-received stand-alone expansion to Radon Labs' old school RPG Drakensang has a very curious release history outside of its German-speaking continental homelands. To the best of my knowledge, the English version first became available through various North American digital download stores (strictly region-locked to keep us filthy Europeans out, by the way) and only later came to the UK. Now it finally appears to have reached other parts of the non-Germanic world as a proper domestic release rather than being imported from various other places...
...or has it? For the longest time, River of Time was listed as "To Be Released" on only one of the major Swedish online stores for games, music and movies. Since the price was a mere € 5 I strongly suspected that they didn't actually know anything about the game and whether it would come out here at all. Still, I "pre-ordered" it just in case it would eventually show up and, sure enough, today it finally arrived in my mailbox without warning. However, the same online retailer has now labelled the game "Temporarily Out of Stock"...which in this context usually means it's never going to be available for purchase from that store ever again. And as far as I can see the game has still not been made available for purchase to European customers on Steam, GamersGate or similar services.
The whole thing is just plain weird, and with that kind of publishing "support" it's perhaps no wonder that classic-style RPGs from non-indie developers are few and far between...