Starting a thread for those of us who live in Asia and the Oceania regions.
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Here's the fact:
The Asia-Pacific region is teeming with active and dedicated gamers and there are many games being well-marketed and distributed and supported in this huge region. Where MMORPGS are concerned, games like EQ, AC, UO, Lineage and SWG will enter gaming conversations easily. However, Anarchy Online has neither top-of-the-mind presence nor shelf presence.
Here's my experience:
In Singapore, I have only ever seen a display box of AO (yes the empty display box type) way back in July 2001 and it stayed displayed for only a week. Stores here do not carry AO much less heard of the Notum Wars booster. All of the Singaporeans I know still playing (not many of us left as numbers have been dwindling over the year) ... all downloaded AO during Live Launch. We do not have the AO cd.
For myself, I recently had NW activated as an ingame friend very kindly and sweetly gave me the booster as a christmas present. More likely he took pity on me also, heh. However, as a customer, I remain highly concerned about getting future boosters and expansion packs.
Here's my query for Funcom marketing:
It is obvious your main distribution efforts are for the North America and Europe markets but will you eventually look into the distribution for Asia-Pacific? If not, then will download options be made available after a suitable lead-time for shelf sales has passed?