Locked Out

It's been a while, yet again, but that can hopefully be glossed over for now as it's been a regular occurence for some time. What isn't a regular thing is that I'm going to start this off with a rant.

You see, for a while, I used to import games. For some time before that, I just bought domestic ones. Now, I'm maintaining a mix of the two, based purely on the game itself, when it comes out, and how much it might cost me. As a consumer, it's ideal for me. There were occasions where I would have to bypass region protection that was on consoles, but this was either through buying a disc that enabled me to do so, or in some cases, actually having a console from a different region. It was all over the counter and didn't really involve anything suspect.

These days, with regular firmware updates, to do something like that involves messing around with the firmware on your system, sometimes putting you at risk of breaking it, and is a process that companies are trying somewhat vigilantly to stop. It's not something I approve of, simply for the risk involved and the cost of replacing a potentially broken console.

Last night, Etrian Odyssey IV was announced, a series which I have long held a soft spot for. It was announced for the 3DS. Nintendo, as of recent years, have been enforcing region protection on their handhelds, something which was nonexistant from the beginning. It was there on a few games on the DSi, but is system-wide on the 3DS. I've never exactly been a big fan of Nintendo, but this hardly helps matters.

As far as I can tell, importing is still something that is a very, very minor part of the market, and actually making an effort to stamp that out doesn't make sense to me. With Nintendo having a large part of the casual market under their thrall, I can't imagine that the user base there would look into obtaining a game from a different country.

Furthermore, I was in the Pokemon Centre in Tokyo recently, where they had a couple of the games on sale, that proudly advertised that the games worked on any DS model, just that the language would only be in Japanese. Pokemon is one of the main offenders for games with this recently installed region protection, should you own a DSi or anything beyond it. It leads me to believe that Nintendo doesn't actually pay attention to it's own enforcements, provided there is some form of profit to be made.

It reminds me of the whole issue with DRM these days, that "protection" and whatever it actually is does more to punish the regular consumer than those who completely bypass it with less than legal methods. I just can't see what there is to be gained by it.

I just want to play videogames.