Ace Combat 8's Belkan War mess: the Steam page said standalone, it wasn't

Pre-order bonuses have always been a bit of a trick dressed up as a gift. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve just handed us a textbook example - though this time the trick wasn't in the small print, it was in the big print.

The deal sounded generous: pre-order the new flight game and you also get Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, the 2006 PS2 fan favourite. On Steam, the store page described Zero as a standalone application, separate from the full game. When early access opened, those who'd paid for the Deluxe edition - £75 or $90 in the UK and US, for the privilege of flying three days early - found something else. On PC, Zero ships as DLC, you start it through an Ace Combat 8 launcher prompt, and the hours you put into it are logged as Ace Combat 8 playtime. Want to play a twenty-year-old game? Install the huge new one first.

That's not players misreading an offer. The listing said one thing and the product does another. As far as I can tell, this is a Steam problem - console players don't appear to be dealing with the same situation.

Why Zero can't just be sold on its own

The team behind Ace Combat 8 has now apologised for failing to communicate this clearly in advance, and it explained the background. The licences from the fighter-jet manufacturers whose planes appear in Zero only allow the game to be distributed as a pre-order bonus - not sold as a separate product. That's also why it's tied to Ace Combat 8 in the first place. The developer says it will explore possible solutions, including talks with platform partners.

I'll give them credit for explaining the licensing side instead of hiding behind a vague statement. But it cuts both ways: if the contracts never allowed a standalone product, the Steam page should never have used the word standalone. That's the actual mistake here, and no amount of "we didn't explain it well" changes it.

For players in our region it stings a bit more. A Deluxe edition isn't pocket change on local salaries, and a lot of us justify the pricier tier precisely because of extras like these. Finding out the extra lives inside a massive install you might not want to keep on your SSD is not what anyone signed up for.

So what's realistic? Not a standalone release you can buy - the licences rule that out. The best outcome is a technical fix: a way to install and launch Zero on Steam without dragging the whole of Ace Combat 8 along, if Valve and the publisher can make that work within the contract. Until that happens, the honest description of this bonus is simple: Zero is a mode you get with Ace Combat 8, not a second game in your library. It should have said so from day one.

Image: U.S. Navy / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F-14_Tomcat_prototypes_in_flight_c1972.jpg