Unable to buy Portal in Germany ?

[friendlyfire]

The store page says USK 12 (https://store.steampowered.com/app/400/Portal/), but it seems the game is still unavailable to buy in Germany ? Any update on when it will be available again?

[johnny_garlic]

Same here. I contacted support and they told me that they are going to forward it to the people who are in charge of things like that. They could not tell me when it would be available again though.

I figured that accidentally not being able to make money with one of your most famous products in a big market would be a good motivator to fix it asap, but oh well. Especially since, despite the ridiculousness of German game censorship of the 90s and 00s, Portal was never close to being banned or even censored here.

[nian]

Originally posted by johnny_garlic:

Same here. I contacted support and they told me that they are going to forward it to the people who are in charge of things like that. They could not tell me when it would be available again though.

I figured that accidentally not being able to make money with one of your most famous products in a big market would be a good motivator to fix it asap, but oh well. Especially since, despite the ridiculousness of German game censorship of the 90s and 00s, Portal was never close to being banned or even censored here.

Thank you. If you hear anything back from Steam support, please let us know.
Also, Portal is not the only example of this. A bunch of older games who recently got their age ratings for Germany are still unable to be purchased. No clue why or how long this takes to fix.

[johnny_garlic]

Originally posted by nian:

Originally posted by johnny_garlic:

Same here. I contacted support and they told me that they are going to forward it to the people who are in charge of things like that. They could not tell me when it would be available again though.

I figured that accidentally not being able to make money with one of your most famous products in a big market would be a good motivator to fix it asap, but oh well. Especially since, despite the ridiculousness of German game censorship of the 90s and 00s, Portal was never close to being banned or even censored here.

Thank you. If you hear anything back from Steam support, please let us know.
Also, Portal is not the only example of this. A bunch of older games who recently got their age ratings for Germany are still unable to be purchased. No clue why or how long this takes to fix.

I get that indie devs or the publishers maintaining older games don't have the time or can't be bothered to quickly take care of things when Bundestag decides to throw stuff at video games again (or the Valve tech folks removing the geolock tag on all of those), but this is a game owned by the company that owns Steam. Bloody bizarre that this takes so long.

Upside-down Germany: You CAN by uncensored Half-Life. You CANNOT buy a puzzle game.

I'll let you know if there is any notification, but it seems support could not do much more. The message sounded like "we told the people who can change this, nothing more we can do".

I'll add that this is probably a bug in the store, though. The game has a visible price and all. It's also been officially released and rated long enough to buy a beer here, so there really should not be any problem in the first place.

[nian]

Originally posted by johnny_garlic:

Originally posted by nian:

Thank you. If you hear anything back from Steam support, please let us know.
Also, Portal is not the only example of this. A bunch of older games who recently got their age ratings for Germany are still unable to be purchased. No clue why or how long this takes to fix.

I get that indie devs or the publishers maintaining older games don't have the time or can't be bothered to quickly take care of things when Bundestag decides to throw stuff at video games again (or the Valve tech folks removing the geolock tag on all of those), but this is a game owned by the company that owns Steam. Bloody bizarre that this takes so long.

I'll let you know if there is any notification, but it seems support could not do much more. The message sounded like "we told the people who can change this, nothing more we can do".

I'm quite sure that this is an automatic process. As soon as a developer fills out the content survey, you can see on SteamDB that the georestriction gets removed from the app.

But then it still takes days until the game can be found in the search again.
And some games still have this issue (like Portal, Undertale, etc.) where they cannot be purchased despite now having an age rating.

EDIT: Yeah, definitely some kind of bug. Especially because some games needed only hours until they could be bought again after the age rating appeared.

[nian]

Now it works. Seems the bug has been fixed.

[johnny_garlic]

Neat. Thanks for letting me/us know!