Feldon 
Getting a jump on the holiday season (and a full 100 days before its official launch), the EverQuest II Sentinel’s Fate expansion has been made available for pre-order!!
The most remarkable part of this announcement is the extraordinary measures being taken to get EverQuest II back onto Retail shelves and getting retailers to take the game seriously. With Sentinel’s Fate, it is now clear that the preferred version of EverQuest II will be the retail Collector’s Edition. Not only with in-box and in-game exclusive items, but the release schedule. The Retail version will be available fully 1 week before the Digital Download.
This is a ballsy move and one which will likely be greeted with some skepticism and anger. But many players have been clamoring for better retail presence of EverQuest II. Part of this is the in-box rewards, but perhaps a bigger part is that new players are more likely to come to the game if retail boxes are present. And I believe that having the digital download available on the same day as the retail version was, no doubt, a great demotivator to retailers to bother providing retail space or ordering sufficient boxes.
Now our spotlight rests squarely on the SoE Marketing Department. This is make-or-break time for them. They’ve let us down with the confusing Rise of Kunark pre-order Burynai reward, and they stumbled in providing Best Buy with the incorrect street date for The Shadow Odyssey. All eyes now rest on them to make Sentinel’s Fate a successful launch available to the widest possible audience of players in North America and worldwide.
They have a great opportunity here to surprise players and get EverQuest II back in stores and solve the availability problems we’ve faced in the past few years. Specifically, we will also be watching to see if there are any issues for International customers wishing to purchase EverQuest II as there have been in past years.
They say it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog, and I’m not ready to concede to WoW. Hopefully SoE isn’t either.
From EQ2Players.com:
Sentinel’s Fate will be available for pre-order beginning on Thursday, November 12, 2009! Sentinel’s Fate will be a compilation pack, containing the previous five expansions and three adventure packs. Sentinel’s Fate is EverQuest II’s sixth expansion, and marks the return of Odus to Norrath. New and veteran players alike will find tons of new content for all playstyles to explore.. More information about this newest addition to the EQII universe will be revealed in the months to come at EQ2Players.
All versions, both retail and digital download come with the compilation all-in-one game. This includes the following expansions: Desert of Flames, Kingdom of Sky, Echoes of Faydwer, Rise of Kunark, The Shadow Odyssey, Sentinel’s Fate; and the following Adventure Packs: The Bloodline Chronicles, The Splitpaw Saga, and Fallen Dynasty.
| Retail Pre-order: $39.99 | The retail box may be pre-ordered starting on Nov. 12th, 2009. It will include the following:
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| Retail Only Collector’s Edition Pre-order:$69.99 | The Collector’s Edition retail box may be pre-ordered starting on Nov. 12th, 2009. It will include the following:
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| Digital Download:$39.99 | There is no pre-order for the digital download. This will be available for purchase through the Station Store, D2D, and Steam. It will include the following:
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The retail pre-order may be obtained solely through North American retailers: Best Buy, GameStop and Amazon. You may pre-order through these retailers online. International players wishing to order a retail box may purchase through GameStop and Amazon and have their box shipped.
Retail Pre-Order Links:
- Amazon.com EQ2:Sentinel’s Fate Collector’s $69.95
- Amazon.com EQ2:Sentinel’s Fate $39.95
- GameStop.com EQ2:Sentinel’s Fate Collector’s $69.95
- GameStop.com EQ2:Sentinel’s Fate $39.95
Links from BestBuy.com are forthcoming as their website has not yet been updated.
“…I’m not ready to concede to WoW. Hopefully SoE isn’t either.”
If you want to compete with WoW for shelf space, you have to move comparable numbers of boxes. Meanwhile, Blizzard has yet to obsolete any retail boxes for WoW – the nearly five-year-old base game key is still required to start a new account to this day – where every single EQ2 box in existence up through October is already obsolete and even the brand new Complete Collection will be obsolete when the next expansion launches.
Shelf space is a noble goal, and a more aggressive pre-order program should help ensure that players in the Continental US are able get retailers to stock boxes that are spoken through by a reserved pre-order. Even so, retailers who have paid any attention whatsoever to the history of EQ2 boxes won’t be fooled by a seven-day exclusive window. Given that it sounds like international players will pay a massive premium in shipping fees to make even this limited retail presence happen, you can really question its value.
Also, failing to finalize the details of the pre-order bonus items’ stats is a great way to get people to delay their pre-order, which is kind of the exact opposite of how these things are supposed to work.
P.S. What retail shelf space? Amazon doesn’t have retail stores. Most Gamestops I’ve seen don’t stock ANY computer games anymore outside of launch day pre-orders (not even WoW, and who can blame them when they get a piece of the $40 box price and not a dime of the $180/year in subscription fees?). “Pre-ordering” at a retail Best Buy location doesn’t actually guarantee you a copy – they’ll just put the copies they have out on the shelves and people who have their pre-order receipt handy will get credit for the $5 deposit, but you’re SOL if they run out (a real possibility if they’re not stocking many TSF boxes to begin with).
Where are Target and Walmart, both of whom carry Free Realms SC cards? (In fairness, I don’t think these stores hold reserved copies for pre-order customers either.) Maybe they’re coming later, but that’ll be too late for people who order from out of the outlets that are online right now.
And why, for the love of cheese, would you go out of your way to have players go to a physical retail store to buy their expansion boxes, but then discourage them from upgrading their second account when they’re already in the store by including a direct download coupon? Because SOE gets a larger cut (100%?) of the direct download price? Do they think that retailers won’t notice that little detail in SOE’s sudden show of love for the retail gaming industry?
The only upshot I can think of in this whole fiasco is that players who are willing to wait the week might be able to get the $10 coupon for less than $10 from early adopters who don’t have a second account.
this looks a right rip-off!
dd should be cheaper (no packaging, distribution/transport costs)
No 7day head start and no $10 coupon but its still same price as box version and you get more with it!
dd looks a con imo
Green Armadillo is SOOOOO right here…. case in point, I was just in Best Buy this evening looking to find out if they had any SF xpac’s in store for the release tomorrow. But oddly on the shelf there were 2 copies of the ALL in ONE eq2 box that is officialy garbage right now.. and anyone who buys/bought it will immediately say “WTF?” realizing they dont even have the most current version of the game. I hope tomorrow when i go buy the new xpac those old copies are gone.. but we all know they wont be.
I pre-ordered SF from best buy 2 months ago and it didn’t even come today… Why?! Such crap.