Aliens: Colonial Marines is out in some parts of the world, but players who picked it up for the PC have found themselves unable to play the game. Upon completing their downloads, players receive an error complaining of a missing executable required to launch the game.
Australian players have taken to the Steam and Gearbox forums for the game to complain of the error, and of their inability to play the game in spite of its early release in Australia. As of the time of this writing, the complaints on the Gearbox forums are over 20 pages long.
A Gearbox employee has responded to their complaints by saying that the executable should become available once the game is unlocked in their region—which it has been. He also suggested restarting Steam and verifying the Aliens: Colonial Marines game cache.
The advice isn't particularly helpful, as the file remains unavailable despite being officially released in Australia.
In a later statement, Gearbox appears aware of the problem and posted a subsequent update: "We’re working closely with SEGA and Valve to address this. More details as we have them."
This incident highlights the problem with digital releases, especially in comparison to console copies of the game, which are fully playable and require no online activation.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is going to be unlocked internationally in a couple of hours from now, so no amount of fixing is going to undo the error, given that Australian gamers have had access to the PC version of the game since early Saturday.
