Achievement Locked

I was recently wondering about region locking on today's home consoles. On Wii it is mandatory as per tradition, while on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 it is simply an option open to publishers (though locking is far less common with PS3 games).

As far as I can see, the only justification for a region lock is to encourage consumers to buy games in their own region where they otherwise might be able to import sooner or for less money. This keeps the gears of the games business turning worldwide (I have mentioned the folly of taking retailers for granted before) and also provides potentially useful information to marketing folks about how to treat future products in specific regions.

But with region locking now optional for the most part, I have to question the thought process behind its use on games that are entirely unavailable in certain regions. For example, a look over Play-Asia.com's handy compatibility guide for the Xbox 360 shows several games unreleased outside of Japan, but only playable on Japanese systems - games for which there are no plans (and little to no chance) of further localisation, such as visual novels or danmaku shooters.

So what advantage could this possibly offer to publishers? Without a big enough foreign market to justify localisation and shipping across further regions, surely by preventing any foreign players from playing their games imported they are essentially costing themselves local sales. Likely not a huge number of sales, admittedly, but sales nonetheless. It leaves import gamers with, bar piracy, two options: modifying their console to bypass the region lock - not something platform holders would be quick to encourage, and illegal in some places; or importing a whole new console, which is of course prohibitively expensive.

Another curiosity of Play-Asia's list is that all of the 360's unlocked games are major cross-regional releases such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed or Halo 3: ODST - surely the only sort of game that could actually benefit from region locking, though to be fair in this age of near-simultaneous worldwide releases even that is unlikely. And these games are generally also available completely locked in certain regions, such as Gears of War's Japanese edition (presumably a decision made based on the disc space available for different languages), confusing the matter further.

It just strikes me as backwards, and I'd like to see region locking done away with altogether, or at least its general use reconsidered. Not that my weblog's audience is likely to include very many Japanese videogame publishing executives, mind.