Time to Go

Regional locking is still going strong even today, knowing that Nintendo has confirmed that its newest handheld the 3DS will also have it. That's unbelievable, really.

In this modern age of internet society, with its never ending growth of technological breakthroughs and innovations, I simply find the idea of regional locking to be outdated. There are several reasons that Nintendo keeps including it, and I can see why, but I believe a better idea will be needed to strike against piracy, hacking and even importing.

I am, as my friends already know for a long time, a supporter of the game industry, and thus I keep buying the latest games I am eager to try. Ironically, that is not the case for movies, like many, many others can tell you also about. But because I do not spend my money anywhere else, I am content with what I am doing.

Here in the Netherlands, it is common to spot kids with DS's in their hands scrolling through menu's created by R4 cartridges, which basically hold a great number of hacked DS games. Obviously bad for Nintendo, and it was easy to do so because the DS is regional free, unlike its successor.

The reason that the 3DS is regional locked like the consoles is not mainly because of piracy, but because the computer has an online service that constantly is active even in sleeping mode, bringing in various updates, information from other 3DS devices and perhaps more activities. Opening the gates then would be very welcoming for hackers looking for a new challenge in security methods.

Another reason for regional lock would have to be profit. The currency of the American Dollar, the Japanese Yen and the European Euro vary, and if we all would suddenly decide to only import games from Japan from now on, the economy would suffer from it.

But see it at a different point of view. What if Nintendo did allow foreign games to work on everyone of their systems? It's interesting to think about the possibility that everyone may, at one point, consider to allow these kind of gathering abilities such as importing and downloading, and I mean in every way then.

I'd say that security should not turn up as regional lock, but rather as something more effective, for all of us. It really is an annoying fact that even though I have a FreeLoader specifically for the Wii, I cannot even no longer play foreign games on it, because of an update that prevents us from doing so. And so, this battle continues. The battle of region exclusive games.

If it were for the gamers, the ones that buy the games in the end no matter how much illegal activities happen, I would say that it is time to go for regional locking, and that Nintendo and other companies using this method should find different ways of keeping the profit, countering the hacking and in the end, continueing the distribution. So that not all of us would be screwed over in this mess.

There is probably more to it than the thoughts I just shared, but I wish that it would go away for once.