I can somewhat understand where Nintendo is coming from. In the past Nintendo has taken import stores to court for breaking their release dates by importing games from other regions. Nintendo has claimed that people importing the game will not buy it in their region.
I can understand this. Nintendo uses profits from each region to run their regional facilities and to decide whether to bring a game to a specific region. Nintendo relies on sales data often to decide whether to bring a game stateside or Europe.
Say 500K gamers in Europe import their game from US, then the game is released and sells only 150k in Europe. Well Nintendo sees a huge sales rate in the US but not in Europe. They may decide to not bring future installations to Europe. Another example American's import 1-million copies of a game from Japan, it launches stateside and sells only a few thousand. Well Nintendo won't localize that franchise anymore. This would be especially bad for Australia who's market isn't as big as other markets, Nintendo could stop localizing many games altogether meaning Australians would have to import. Same goes for many small countries in Europe and elsewhere, if Nintendo sees less demand they produce and localize less games.
Another example is the amount of copies Nintendo provides to a specific region. I know Nintendo monitors how many copies sell in which cities and countries. Then based on demand they supply units. Say everyone in your city imported the game, now Nintendo sees no demand so they stop shipping the game to your region.
Its better for Nintendo to know exactly where and how much their games are selling. Importation makes it very hard to track where the games are actually selling.
-JC7
"In God We Trust - In Games We Play " - Joel Reimer
