Remember back when the Wii was first launched, someone discovered that you can play games from other regions if you loaded a game from your region, hit START, then eject the disk and put another one in before the game booted and it worked?
Does anything similar work for the Wii U? Or are there any freeloader discs out there? I know Datel made a freeloader disc for the Wii so you can play games from other regions. I want to get the Japanese version of Pikmin 3 so I can play a few months early but there's no way I'm buying a Japanese Wii U just for that!
Why are they region locked anyway?? I know I got European/Japanese PS3 games before and they worked. I even made Japanese and European PS3 accounts and downloaded games and apps that were "exclusive" to those regions!
Region locking isn't to prevent piracy it's there to maintain the artificial region barriers. If you buy a game from Japan and want to play it on your Australian machine you aren't a pirate. You paid for the game in the same way that everybody else in Japan did. I can do this with books or CDs or any of the various kinds of physical products and it's not "stealing".
What happens is that retailers and distributors of particular regions decide on the RRP and release schedule for that region. A different price for Japan, the US, Europe, Australia etc, etc. To maintain that price they make it so that a game brought in one region won't work with a system from another. That way people can't start a business selling cheap imports, which famously happened in Australia, and retailer panic won't follow, as happened in Australia.....
I'm firmly on the side of the importers because I'm no protectionist. The fact that this sort of thing can and does happen is a large part of the reason why the Australian release schedules and prices are slowly improving
I guess I should be more clear on what I mean about piracy. I thought it was so that one person couldn't buy it say in North America days before the Australian release date and make copies of a NA version of a game and sell it in Australian markets.
RetiredPush Square Moderator and all around retro gamer.
They didn't sell pirated copies when they broke the region locking because that would have been illegal. They imported original retail copies and sold them before the Australian release. At higher prices than RRP most of the time but they sold well because it was sometimes months before the official release. They eventually "solved" the problem not so much by better region locking but by bringing the Australian release forward. On price they "solved" the problem by bringing the Australian RRP down closer to European prices + import.
If there was no region locking the net-result would be cheaper prices for everyone not in the cheapest regions and more uniform global releases. Neither of these things hurt developers.... but they annoy the hell out of local retailers because they'd lose their slice and would eventually go bust in more expensive regions.
It's worth pointing out that because of the above and because of online sales closing the gap stores like Gametraders have mostly disappeared
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Topic: Freeloading games?
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