So Borderlands 2 comes out in American tomorrow yet Me and everyone esle in the UK and Europe have to wait until Friday to get the game? Is there reason for this? I reckon the shops get all their game copies like an week before release day so it stands to reason they could just release them on the same day? Bethesada did it for skyrim why not eveyone else?

so does anyone know the reason?

There's all kinds of reasons for it, which can vary from release to release, area to area, how much influence/demand the publisher can have, and so on.

I think I read on the forums that new release day in the US is typically Tues, while in Europe it's Fri. Thus in this case that may the reason. eg, the retailers are not often going to change their financial stocking system/sales rating periods systems for a worldwide same-day release.

Its not the first time games have been released days earlier in the U.S, borderlands 2 comes out on thursday here, i think its worse if theres a multiplayer element were people get to get ahead of others.

Although my local games store got their copies on monday.

Because America hates us

Why do Japanese games often come out later in the US than in Japan? Same principle. The advantages to distribution in your own country makes things easier to sell there. There are assuredly costs to distributing products internationally and then there is just the simple translation times and differing norms for release days

Obviously move to America.

Thing is, even when they're distributed on Steam, the UK often has to wait. And it's not like there's any translation involved: I'm not sure I've ever seen a game from a US studio with UK spellings, for instance.

The only explanation I've seen is "we've always released games on Tuesday and you've always released games on Friday. So you have to wait." Which is a bit of a non-answer as explanations go...

Well, when it comes to the bookkeepers being able to trumpet what the sales figures are, or speed, or whatever they like to measure these days, there tend to be established notions of what time period the figures come from, and I'd suspect they'd like it if digital sales matched. Of course, such dates/time periods tend to be somewhat flexible ... like how films will sometimes release on Thur. or even Wed so they can lump that in with "weekend" figures. Anyway .... generally speaking, it's probably usually some reason like that. Sometimes a company may be able to push for/market a same day release but probably it's not worth the effort most of the time.

No they don't, in MW Gaz says "Cellphone" despite us calling them mobiles in the Uk. I only renember that cause I read up the mission on the wiki whlist looking for intel but I bet theirs petty more

Probably, there's an awful lot of careful massaging of figures which tends to take priority over everything else!

I think what's irritating is when there's a UK studio with a US publisher, such as Lionhead and Microsoft, in which case the UK still has to wait even for locally-developed games... The worst aspect of the delay in general terms is the tendency of spoilers to start leaking out in those first few days when everyone else is waiting to start playing.

There're lots of examples; dialogue is pretty difficult to re-record so I can't really complain about that (though I think it would be useful to avoid terms like "first floor" which can be confusing) but when it's minor spelling differences such as changing "armor" to "armour" you think they could've made a bit of effort. It's not just games, a lot of software is the same, if you look at the proliferation of "favorites" and so on: Windows is a particularly annoying culprit as you can have virtually every language under the sun, but if you want English without US spellings you're out of luck.

Because there is his huge body of water between the two continents.

No that's just a myth. There is actually nothing there.

Games are shiped to stores like the week before so thats not the reason

I'm planning on walking to Sweden next year. It'll take a while, but I have the time.