no, specific shops in germany/austria send the games so early to give them to you earlier, that's one of their strategies to succeed against huge amazon and so on.... just check some xbox 360 games and go on a site which tracks users and which games they play, you will see that many gamers in germany will have the games some days before release because they preorder exactly where they get the games earlier. it's not like with amazon who send the game to you 1-2 days  earlier and if you have luck you get it one day earlier. to look for early gamers worked pretty good with mygamercard.net in the past but that site in no more   few days before release you could already see some gamers playing the games and most of them came from germany and few other countries.

if you get a game on saturday which releases on the tuesday or even thursday the week later, it has nothing to do with what you said.

and what you said about the stores is also wrong, some stores also sell the games days before release. not all but some. that was already explained in this thread, no clue why you even said that...

you are so funny omg

But what were you thinking Andrew, did you really think a digital download game on Steam would be allowed to play before the official release date?

Yeah actually I was. I know Zarx had the chance to play Darksiders before the official release.

Oh, he did? That must have been a mistake by Steam. They would get a lot of criticism from publishers if it became a habit to leak games before the official release date. An obscure German e-tailer can leak games early without anyone noticing but not a huge download site like Steam.

When is the release date for Dishonored btw?

And what kind of PC do you have, how strong of a GPU?

the official european release date is 12.10.2012 so its in about 20 minutes.

AMD Asus Radeon 6950 HD so far I had no problems to run any games on it.

But it is  available for PS3 and Xbox360 as well.

Cool, so you will play Dishonored some time after midnight?

lol I know it's on console too. It's my most anticipated game of 2012.

yes 8 minutes left. I will post my impressions into my Dishonored Thread.

Have you seen "The tales of Dunwall"?

Well it depends on what it is.  I dont preorder anything unless it has a bonus and I know im getting it at launch anyways.  Or like Halo 4 for example I preordered the limited edition because itll sale out quickly, in fact its already sold out

You know, I just realized that this thread brings up an interesting point. Guild Wars 2 was available to play 3 days before launch for those who pre-ordered it. Star Wars: The Old Republic had a similar pre-play time for gamers who pre-ordered.

What's wrong with allowing gamers early access to your game when they pre-order? Perhaps this should be a new trend. I'd like this.