I talked to Gamestop a long time ago when I first saw that they were taking preorders for the regular version and the release date was still unknown. They haven’t received SquareEnix CEs in a long time.

I know people and trying to justify it with the ARR 2.0 CE version that was release in retail stores, but you have to remember that they were still optimistic about the future of the game. It was used as an advertising gig for those that came into a store and saw it. The 2.0 edition sold quickly once word spread about how great the game was. From a marketing stand point, they probably realized that they can just cut out the middle man and sell the CEs on their store because their hardcore fans will know to be on stand by to snag CEs.

I hope that with the preorder release on 16th will be more of a tally count on how many CEs to make versus a set quantity. They let us know how many Type-Zero CEs would be available. Seeing that they haven’t announced the quantity yet for Heavensward, I’m hoping it will be my assumption and it will be a timed CE availability. There is still almost 3 months to go before official release.

Since this is just an expansion, it would be smart for them to not set the activation code based on region since your account already states its region. The expansion code would be just a ticket to allow you into the Heavensward content.

I’m sure they would not purposely exclude a country from accessing their CEs unless there was a reason. A lot of the time it has to do with Government regulations.