According to a blog post on the Civilization V website, the release date for the game’s highly anticipated demo has been pushed back to September 21st, the same day the full game is released in North America.

As we reported earlier this month, Firaxis, the studio behind upcoming strategy game Civilization V initially announced that a playable demo of the game would be made available soon.

The decision to release the demo on the same day as the full release is quite unusual, as the whole premise behind a demo is to allow users to ‘test’ the game pre release. According to the blog post on the Civilization V site, “at the time of the announcement, we expected to be able to get the demo out before the 21st, but unfortunately we weren’t able to finalize it in the timeframe we had initially planned, and for that we’re very sorry.”

The post did state that gamers in North America could still try the demo and purchase it on the same day if they enjoyed the experience.

The demo will be available through online download for the entire world to enjoy on the 21st of September and the game will release in Europe (and South Africa) on the 24th of September. The decision therefore doesn't affect local gamers that much, we'll just have to wait a few extra days for the demo.