A Region-Free Nintendo Console?

Satoru Iwata Says Nintendo "Must Consider" Ending Region Locking

By Sean Perryman on November 4, 2014 at 10:43am

At a recent Q&A session with investors, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said, "Region-locking has existed due to circumstances on the sellers' side rather than for the sake of the customers. In the history of game consoles, that is the current situation."

This speaks volumes for the struggling game company, as they are currently the only "next gen" console with a region lock in place. There has since been a movement to get this removed under the twitter hashtag #NintendoRegionFree.

"Regional Lockout" was instituted to stop the cross-pollination of video games between markets. As long as video games have existed, gamers from different parts of the world hungered for games from abroad. There has always been a strong culture of importing gaming equipment from other countries, but in previous generations, it required importing a console as well.

Permanently removing the regional lockout from consoles would mean that if a game came out in Japan first, Americans could buy it and play it before the game hit the shelves in their local stores. This could put pressure on game publishers to release to all markets at the same time, but few consumers would see that as a negative.