Oh lol. EB Games is selling copies of Star Wars: The Old Republic today in stores.
Retailers just don't give a fuck anymore!
EA got this rated late 2011 so its legal
so EB are using EA's paid for classification rating to sell it here
if it wasnt rated yet they wouldn't be allowed to sell it
EA will be rather pissed off. Plus the fact that there is no local customer service, wait queues are 2-3 hours on the phone to the US right now (and thats obviously expensive) and everything is charged in USD on the site etc etc
Basically EB is creating EA a headache. EB isn't going to do the custoemr service etc. When a customer imports a game, its their risk. When a customer buys locally they are protected by consumer protection legislation so if things go pear shaped (aka a massive bill for a 3 hour call to the US) then EA could be held liable under fair trading as its their product.
This is not a simple, import and sell. This is a game that requires significant infrastructure to run including CS teams, servers etc. This is why they didn't do a worldwide release. Those who have started to play (myself included) realise there is a risk in that we will get bad pings, we will have a bad time with customer service and won't be able to call for at least a few months without getting charged $1000's, but we choose to do that.
Unwitting customer walking into EB does not know this. I believe there is a thing on the back of the SWTOR box that says it must not be sold outside the USA. When you are buying from Amazon/Origin you are buying it from within the USA and exporting it.
Buying it in AU, you are not buying it within the USA. So there is all sorts of issues this could lead to.
EA can't go after EB to much because EB is to big to fuck over in terms of revenue and the biggest issue is that EB knows it. EB is to big for the AU game industry now. We have a serious problem with their market share levels and what they can get away with because of it.
People just dont consider this. EB are creating a massive headache for EA, and quite frnakly they dont give a fuck. All about that important dollar
someone needs to stand up to them for once
also there has been reports that some of the retail keys weren't loaded into the server and thus won't register. EA has solved this by allocating new keys to origin accounts. its not available in AU so can't have a key allocated to it. Therefore, if you get a EB key and it doesn't work, you might be stuffed. EB probably won't take the game back, EA Aus will tell you to go away as its not an AU version and the CS queues are 3 hrs on the phone.
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=72068
feel free to translate this mess of a post into some level of research serrels/jint
this is not as simple as X company imports and sells. its much bigger because this is a MMO