Hi,

so I went to amazon.co.uk this morning to check my preorder of Skyrim and I noticed a forum thread about Skyrim being possibly region locked.
This would mean I could not play said copy here in Germany. After a bit of research I'm now quite confused on what to do.
There is no official information on that topic anywhere. I wrote an email to both Bethesda and Steam, which have yet to be answered.
Steam has a large thread about it on the forums, but due to a hacker attack this morning they're still down.
Some gaming magazines mentioned the possibility of region lock, but these articles are old.

I absolutly want to cancel my UK order before it ships out, if this stuff is in fact true, so anyone who has viable information on this topic is most welcome to share.

I think what they mean by region lock is like USA, JAPAN, Europe and Australia Markets. So if you bought your game from Amazon Uk you can only play it in Europe, where if you bought it on Amazon US you can only play it in North America, this is possible what it means.

If you have the PC version of the game you have to wait until 11.11.11 before you can play the game. It's locked until the official release date

Region locking the game inside the EU would be against EU regulations.

Nothing official has been stated, so we can assume it's not region locked. The Amazon store page would say if it was region locked.


Seems to be, yeah. Square Enix tried it for Deus Ex HR but that decision was turned around a week before release, probably because it wasn't allowed (though they'll probably say it's because they 'listened to the fans' ).

Yes you're absolutly right, the policy of region locking inside the EU would indeed be illegal.

Although personally I'd rather be playing Skyrim on 11.11. than to be right about trade regulations hence this thread.

Considering the major trouble they would be in if they did region lock it, it's a safe bet it won't be region locked.