Comrades,
It's been reported to our Bureau that some of the adventurous souls outside of the united and undivided Soviet Union have entertained a vague thought of ordering HOI English (known as ORIGINALS edition in our lands) from a Russian online store at a ridiculously low price.
Thereby, our comments follow:
1) yes it is out
2) yes retails at less than in Europe or US
3) to install the game, users must:
a) have Russian Windows (this is checked)
b) have Cyrillic font installed
c) be proficient in Russian language to answer the randomly generated question in Russian since both Q&A are in Russian
c) have Russian keyboard to be able to type in the answer as it requires entering special symbols
4) furthermore, the ORIGINALS version has big letters FOR SALE IN RUSSIA ONLY on both CD and jewel cover so should Ozon etc. attempt to ship it internationally, we will delete them from list of dealers same week after we have that confirmed
.
But in the big way the above is really not important.
What is important is that the game costs less in Russia because on average our players earn $400 a month or less. Charging them 1/10 of monthly income for a game would be too cruel (though EA and the other big companies try to do it). Not releasing the game on the market would be plain throwing the fans into the embrace of pirates. Thus the lower-than-European price.
If you take advantage of this (going to considerable effort to hack the Russian protection), all this can possibly result in is that Russian players won't have sim release of the next game from Paradox because Paradox will not let us release it here at a lower price due to re-exports. This would be sad because then we will have to get the tanks out of garage and invade Scandinavia.
