Medieval II through digi-dist

By Tom Bramwell Published 15 November, 2006

But only in America.

SEGA has joined the ranks of publishers using Valve's Steam service to distribute games, introducing Medieval II: Total War to the service - but only in America.

Medieval II is also sold through rival digital distribution service Direct2Drive, with sales there limited to the US, Canada and Mexico.

Hailing Steam's "proven" ability to deliver "secure and reliable downloads", SEGA of America boss Simon Jeffery said he was pleased to put the game "quickly and easily into the hands of hungry fans everywhere".

However it looks like any hungry fans around here will have to make do with the boxed version, as SEGA's European website merely redirects potential buyers to Amazon and Play.com.

SEGA's UK representatives said they get back to us about whether the game will be released via digital distribution in Europe.

The company, which owns Total War developer Creative Assembly, has previously distributed Rome expansion Alexander over the Internet.

Not that Medieval II's boxed limitation appears to be hurting it much - with the game appearing in the UK charts at number nine based on its first few days on sale.

You can read what we made of it in this week's review.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (7) Latest comment 5 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • brooza #1 5 years ago

    yay for retail!

  • mezzomorto #2 5 years ago

    well I for one would welcome digital distribution for M2 as, although I prefer the safety blanket aspect of having the boxed copy gathering dust on my shelf, living in Spain and wanting to play the English language version works out more expensive and inconvenient...

  • fawe3 #3 5 years ago

    Hm... anyone had any sucess faking ip area with proxy servers?

  • Reapergold #4 5 years ago

    Lol this made me laugh because i pre-ordered from play months ago. Checking steam yesterday showed it still on pre-load while play had delivered it to me 3 days ago :) woot

  • NemesisZero #5 5 years ago

    Just a small thing, but ChartTrack does not consider digital distribution when compiling those charts. That last paragraph's intro is in so far nonsensical. If anything, a strong digital delivery success would hurt a game's chart position because people who download it won't buy it at the retailer.
    Edited by 1 at 15/11/06 @ 13:13

  • Kami #6 5 years ago

    Actually, the sad thing is there are lots of games made available through digital distribution - but only in the States. Which really is rather depressing, seeing as PC games have no regional encoding as such and could so easily be shared to Europe and Australia as well to boot.

    I know and greatly understand that digital distribution is, for lack of better terminology, in its infancy somewhat. But this huge divide is going to be a huge deal-breaker for games. Digital distribution has some huge advantages - if you got a PC and a half-decent broadband connection, a game can almost instantly achieve global release, as well as helping to compete with manufacturing and packaging costs. It's sometimes easier and you are not having to worry if a games hard copy "sells out", because with no physical medium in between you have nigh unlimited copies. Yes, there are also negatives. Retail costs may suffer, no hard copy means PC reformat leads to having to redownload a game etc.

    The big problem with digital distribution right now is simply for the majority of big titles, the digital distribution is only happening in America. Meaning the rest of the world has to purchase a physical copy. Once this barrier is shattered, digital distribution could be a very realistic challenge to physical media provided it is done safely, securely and you can redownload a game if you happen to need to do so.

    Until then, it's sadly going to remain an extremely niche market...

  • Wite_Noiz #7 5 years ago

    Like reapergold, I had been playing M2 since day of release (well, evening - damned job) and laughed when it appeared on Steam over the weekend.
    I would have bought it over Steam (if they'd let us) had it been a) announced earlier and b) been cheap enough to warrant it.

    I ended up buying it from Play, just like I did Dark Messiah, because they were able to cut so much off the RRP.
    Dark Messiah can be added to Steam from the retail version, which is handy; alas, M2 cannot (or I haven't found out how, at least).