AngryAlien: For me it were "Dying Light" and "Dead Island 2". I said "were", because "Dying Light" will not be released in Germany and apparently even gets region locked. And as far as I know, "Dead Island 2" will suffer the same fate.
So far from a gamers perspective 2015 already sucks.
Shadowstalker16: Why?
I take it you are asking why the games will not be released in Germany and not why this sucks. :D
Well, because german politics are a bunch of hipocrytes and people at Valve and many publishers are a bunch of idiots. That is at least how I take it.
The german Protection of Young Persons Act is pretty drastic, which might be a good thing, but then again I all too often see that "protection of young persons" is only taken seriously when it costs no money. I have two social workers in my family, believe me, as soon as it costs money the youth all of a sudden don't need that much protection anymore.
But it always looks good when you can prohibit or ban something and video games are such a nice target. It has become common, for instance, that politics and media call FPS "Killerspiele", "Killergames" or to ignore the many studies that proof that video games don't cause violent behaviour.
We have an agency that rates video games and, when deemed necessary, indexes them. This has serious consequences for video game developers and publishers. In the worst case, the game will land on the infamous
List B, which means that selling becomes illegal, although you usually are still allowed to own them. X-Men Origins: Wolverine or Dead Rising 3 are on that list, for instance, and the original Doom and Beach Head (the old C64 game) were on that list as well.
List A means that selling the game is still legal, but it can not be advertised or displayed openly in stores.
For publishers this means "loss of revenue" for apparent reasons. So they very often release only cut "low violence" versions of their games in preemptive obedience, while hoping that they will still pass the USK (the authority that assesses the games). Games like Resident Evil 4, Fallout 1/2/3, Borderlands and many, many, maaany more are only available as castrated version. In former days, one could still order those games in Austria or GB or trade for them on the Steam. But that has become difficult as well.
One of the worst cases was Wolfenstein: TNO, which was released with full violence, but completely without any of the infamous symbols for apparent reasons. I could have lived with that without problems, but the devs/publishers decided to release the game with a "german only" dubbing, because apparently the common german immediately falls back into old habits as soon as he hears words like "nazi". And the german dubbing does not only kill a huge part of the immersion, it plain sucks. It is really, really bad. But ordering the game in foreign countries is no option this time, since Bethesda had the great idea to region lock the game. And they did this for _every_ german speaking country, which means Austria and Switzerland as well. I can order the game, but I can _not_ activate it on Steam.
But if a game is not region locked and just on List A of the index, it is totally allowed to _sell_ the game. The only thing Valve would need to do is to implement a proper age check. And with proper I mean better than a button that says "I am totally 18 years old". But this would require manpower and some money and Valve can't have that. Because they are way to busy to make money with trading cards or Team Fortress 2 hats. (Oh, you should look up the german version of TF 2 by the way. It is quite an experience to see killed enemies explode into confetti and unicycles. There is no blood at all, which makes spy checking impossible for german players.)
This sometimes leads to very... strange situations. Bethesda decided, for instance, to release Fallout 3 only as a "low violence" version. It later turned out that the uncensored game would still pass the USK and today you can buy the GotY edition in stores with full violence and gore. But on Steam you can get only the "low violence" version of Fallout 3, while the Fallout: New Vegas is available completely uncensored.
And now the publisher of Dying Light decided they will not release the game in Germany (a low violence version is quite impossible for obvious reasons and I would not buy it anyway) and as far as I know they plan to implement a region lock. Hooray.
