Our astute forum community is already well aware of this situation, but for our general news readers interested in the hotly anticipated MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA and Lucasarts have now confirmed that the game will not be available outside of Europe and North America on its initial launch and it's looking very likely that Australia will be among regions left hanging out there.

Of course there's still no actual release date for anyone yet, but all the signs are pointing towards some manner of staggered release by region.

Pre-orders have now opened for Europe and North American customers but supply is being limited, even for digitally distributed copies of the game. The reasoning for all of this appears to be due to insufficient server infrastructure to host the anticipated player population at launch, a notion vaguely confirmed in this forum post by Community Manager Stephen Reid:

To all of our fans outside of North America and Europe:

Today we've announced the pre-order details for the initial launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and as you may now know, we’ve taken the difficult but necessary decision to limit our initial launch supply for the game. BioWare and LucasArts are completely focused on building an exceptional game and an exceptional game service to go with it. We decided to constrain our launch capacity to ensure we deliver a great experience to every player.

Part of the reason this decision was made was because of the overwhelming demand for The Old Republic, and we're humbled by that level of excitement and anticipation. We fully intend to deliver to you an amazing game when we expand our service post-launch, but right now we cannot commit to any timeframe for when that may happen. As soon as we have more information about additional launches in more territories, we’ll let you know.

We are committed to delivering Star Wars: The Old Republic to BioWare and Star Wars fans around the world, and to growing a truly global community.

It's rather unusual for Australian's (and New Zealanders!) to be left out of the circle on a major launch like this as we obviously don't have the language issues of other international locations and our relatively small population shouldn't have a significant impact on the North American servers we'd likely be playing on -- unless they're actually planning local Australian servers (dream on).

For the time being, Australian customers attempting a pre-order from EA's Origin service are met with a "not available in your region message".