Slashdot Mirror
Wii Now Confirmed to Not be Region-Free
legoburner writes "Contrary to an earlier Slashdot story, Nintendo have now stated that the Wii will not be region free. The original claim came from Nintendo America, but Nintendo UK have gone on record denying the claims. They put it rather bluntly, stating: 'We are region-locked,' and that Nintendo America made a mistake by claiming otherwise."
the cosmos in 20 words or less: thumbuki.com
Well the reason for region coding in the first place is simple: price fixing between regions. I know for instance a person with triple citizenship (china, australia, and the US) and she can often get things cheaper in australia even with the cost of shipping than she can in the US itself... The companies want to maximize profit by region though, so they lock devices and media to regions to control the ability for people to buy cheaper versions by importing.
In a very real sense they don't care about your special needs...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
With the wii already a third more expensive in Britain, no doubt the games will have a similar markup.
So, for example a UK price of £179 converts to a $US price of 336 or a VAT free price of 285. So there's still a bit of a mark up against as US price of $250, but it's around 15% rather than some of the inflated differences mentioned elsewhere.
Actually Ive got the inside scoop on this region issue. Nintendo are constructing a special magical field put around it. Its called the FuckYouEuropeField, whenever a european enters europe with the wrong coded region console/game, the unit will automatically self-destruct, taking the offender, or as Nintendo calls them 'EuroScum', with it.
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
And does Europe really get all that many games that we don't get in the US? About the only place you might have a real argument is European gamers getting impatient and wanting to import US titles.
The problem isn't just impatientcy, Europe doesn't always get the games the US does at all. (Especially geeky Japanese stuff). Think stuff like Xenosaga Ep. 1, WarioWare Twisted[1], Shining Tears, Katamari Damacy and I'm sure there are more. Plus the delays can sometimes be stupid, although usually not on the level of the 2 year delay of Animal Crossing.
Plus I'm especially impatient, as I'm in the UK and I speak English, so all this locaisation stuff doesn't matter to me at all.
[1] Although in that case, I can import it of course.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
They're always last to hear the news. I trust Perrin Kaplan over David Yarnton.
They're region loocked: http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/732/732982p1.html
They're not region locked: http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/732/732748p1.html
Madness.
ntsc conversion never has been a big issue over here in europe.
The 60Hz mode on a lot of televisions in the UK is PAL60. This is a variant of PAL that runs at 60 fields per second, instead of the standard 50, and a lower number of scanlines. Converting from NTSC to PAL60 is easy (the number of lines and frame rate are the same, it's just the colour encoding that's different), and so it is a good investment if you are looking for a TV to watch NTSC videos or DVDs on; most DVD players can output PAL60 for DVDs that are encoded for American audiences, since they are just 30fps (interlaced) MPEG-2 streams and can be converted to PAL or NTSC equally easily.
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That's funny because when I was living in Australia I'd buy dvd's and games from the US because that was the cheapest option.
You're joking right? What kind of goods can you get in Australia that are cheaper than the US? I'm in Australia and I often buy stuff like electronics and games/computer gear from overseas because it's so much cheaper than here. We have to pay literally 30-100% more than what other countries pay.