Update: All Interactive Entertainment have confirmed that Saints Row IV will launch in Australia on 12 September.
In an article posted on Kotaku, Director of All Interactive Entertainment, Robert Kingston, explains that “Australian fans of Saints Row IV will obviously be disappointed with this delay”, and that “we have used every means at our disposal to minimise the delay, but unfortunately it just was not possible to keep the same street date as the rest of the world”.
Saints Row IV will now include a free Presidential Pack DLC code for anyone who pre-orders and picks up the game 48 hours after launch.
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Over the weekend, Saints Row IV was reported to have been delayed by roughly a week and Australia will exclusively be late to the release party.
With the Saints Row IV worldwide launch just around the corner, gamers can’t wait to get their hands on the game. But Australians are concerned about the release from their local retailer, due to the recent refusal of classification which has affected the version that needs to be shipped to Australia.
Originally due out on the 22nd of August, EB Games now lists Saints Row IV with a September 12th release date. While this is a confirmed release date for console owners, Steam carries a September release with no specific date at time of writing. In addition to the delay in the Steam store, the game also carries the “Low Violence Version” tag, which is definitely a confusing one.
As reported in the refusal documentation posted on the Australian Classification page, it states that the level of violence was “though frequent, is justified by the storyline. The impact is no higher than strong and can be accommodated at the MA15+ level”, whereas the level of drug use was the culprit of the refused classification.
“Drug use related to incentives or rewards is not permitted. The game Saints Row IV is therefore classified Refused Classification.”
After the game was resubmitted, it was given an MA15+ rating, with the violence being the strongest element of the game. Now for the Steam version to possibly remove sections of this, it may stop people buying the game altogether due to the fact that there are so many games coming out in the near future and this has delivered so poorly due to unforeseen circumstances.