Today Deep Silver announced that the company will be working with Square Enix to distribute Techland's Dead Island out to retailers in North and South America. Deep Silver is still publishing, Square Enix is just getting the game out to store shelves.
I asked Aubrey Norris, PR Czar at Deep Silver, why Square Enix is handling the distribution and it's due to Deep Silver not being large enough to work directly with retailers yet. "Retailers will only buy from companies that they do X amount of regular business with. Since [Deep Silver] is too small to have that, we need a distributor."
"A retailer won't buy from you unless you do X amount of business with them annually" Aubrey went on to tell me that "it's kind of part of establishing yourself as a publisher. You have to get to a certain level of volume before retailers will work with you directly."
I'm pretty sure Deep Silver will be able to reach the level they need with retailers considering how the entire Internet was talking about the chilling Dead Island trailer from a couple of months ago.
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Contest:
7:00 PM on 05.03.2011 | 
I have high hopes for this.
"There's an argument for digital distribution if I've ever heard one."
While it's may seem kind of haughty in print, many types of retailers set benchmarks for vendors/suppliers. A big distributor is constantly being approached about carrying new titles/products/etc., and there's both risk and cost involved in setting up a new skew. It takes time and man-power to negotiate terms and shipping procedures, as well as entering the product into your system. And if customers see the product promos and pre-order, and the supplier doesn't deliver, the blame always falls on the distributor.
There's a lot of new suppliers who flame out before getting the product to the distributor, so it's common for some type of 'track record' to be established before jumping in whole hog. That's not to say it's always a fair shake, or that digital distribution isn't a good thing, but this type of thing is pretty common.
I'm sure their working on it. Their not going to announce it and then wait a coulpe years to release it. They learned their lesson from the grueling wait people suffered for FF13(no it sucks replies please)
The recent Birth By Sleep is an important game in the series story line and a must play.
And while I'm excited for this game, I'm disappointed by how much of a lie the trailer apparently was.
"It is totally different from the trailer."
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Uc2suQSWMX4/TBZJVg2soKI/AAAAAAAACU8/-BG9D-LAcSQ/s1600/captain_obvious.jpg
If this game has barricading and is actually about survival rather than just lvling up from killing every zombie u see i will retract that last statement.