Alby_da_Wolf said:
Mr Khan said:
Joelcool7 said:
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.
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True, if the different divisions of Nintendo are trying to optimize their own profits and not cannibalize one another, though you'd think Nintendo would be encouraging some USA folks to buy Japanese games in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge sorta way, since JP games are more expensive even outside the currency conversion, and made in a stronger currency overall
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The best solution in a globalized world is just two words: simultaneous release. If necessary they can be scattered to launch the better day of the week in each zone, if the release dates are within even a few weeks between each other, at most there would be a very small scale import by totally impatient ones, mostly privates.
Trying to keep markets separed is nowadays so behind the times, does Nintendo want to risk being disrupted?
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Because the market for importing games even when things have been region-free has been so infinitesimal as to be insignificant in the big picture.
Though i agree with your sentiment, certainly
