Region lock doesn't affect me in the slightest. Never in my life I have had the need to import a game from Europe or Japan, and most games than don't get localized don't really interest me. Even if I wanted to it would extremely expensive to do it, and no game is worth throwing that cash.
In any case, while I consider region lock be a bad practice, is not something that actually affects a huge amount of people, sucks for the 5 Europeans who wanted to play this game, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't affect that many people. This isn't the case for Rune Factory 4, but like Ganoncrotch said, how many people can really enjoy Japanese games and fully understand them, or what about Europeans who don't speak English either?
Again, I think region locking is a bad practice, it probably doesn't cost Nintendo anything to make all 3Ds in the world the same, but I feel like a lot of users like to take things out of proportion, in reality most people don't care that much.
Nintendo and PC gamer
