Why South Africa sometimes gets games later than the rest of the world

The South African gaming community was abuzz this past week following the release of LEGO: Dimensions.

Despite being an excellent addition to the Travellers Tales games, part of the excitement surrounding the release arose around finally being able to get our hands on the game.

The game has had a massively staggered release, with the official release date extending as far back as 27 September 2015.

We spoke to Ster Kinekor’s Ronelle Hendricks about the delayed release date and why South Africa sometimes gets games later than the rest of the world:

How early does South Africa get games compared to the rest of the world. Are there any challenges in this regard?

“It depends on the title, but almost without exception we release day and date with Europe, at times there may be a different US date with no defined rule as to who goes first of the two”.

“In the case of DOOM there was a worldwide release date and we had this title in stores on 13 May, at the same time as the global markets”.

“With other titles like Pro Evolution Soccer 2017, there is a US and Europe release date – where we of course will launch in line with the European markets”.

It’s not unusual then for game releases to be separated by a couple of days primarily due to demand and distribution reasons.

This is common in all forms of media including music, movies and television.

It’s also a two way street with Europeans (and by extension South Africans) sometimes getting games earlier than those in the US.

What happened with Lego Dimensions? Why was there such a massive gap between release dates?

“LEGO Dimensions is another story all together, seven key territories were selected to launch in and the roll out to others post that was to be considered and evaluated.”

“We worked with our Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment team for the past year to secure this launch for our territory and luckily with our market not needing any localisation on the game, we secured the launch”.

!Besides the below logistical challenges, the fundamental reason for global staggered release is due to manufacturing constraints of the LEGO pieces. There are a lot of challenges with the logistics of getting the games to SA and distributing it to our retailers”.

“Our Ster-Kinekor Entertainment logistics team is one of our strongest and always endeavour to ensure we are on track and on time to get games to our SA fans despite all the challenges we face”.