It's stupid. The only reason they are region coding is so they don't have to release games within the same period in every region.

That's a deal breaker for me. If true, I'm not getting one until either they are cheap enough to get two, or hackers have dealt with it.

How's that surprising? DSi was already locked.

This "encouraging piracy" thing doesn't work anymore. With or withour region locked people are already looking for ways to allow piracy on it.
That chinese dude that stole that 3DS was already getting request for that purpose lol.

Wasn't the region lock on DSi ony for DD games and not for retail games?

Anyway no big deal for americans and soccer mums but european jrpg lovers are screwed.

Bah, I'll just wait for a 3DS version of Homebrew Channel...

I find it stupid to still use region locking though. If anything it encourages hacking, unless the games are released simultanously in all (western) regions.

And also content control.

The same idea with movies and TV's. They are made incompatible so they can feed you what they want, when they want, how they want.

Think of it as a form of DRM.

This sucks. It's stupid enough that the Wii's region locked, so I miss many great games (ARF, ToG, maybe Xenoblade, and many more) and for the 3DS there're already many great games announced, where I don't have high hopes of a PAL release (e.g. TotA).

Seriously, this crap was the reason why I bought a japanese Wii, but I'm definitely not going to buy 2 3DS just to play those games.

I don't support piracy, but I seriously hope that there'll be some kind of homebrew channel or whatever if this is true. I can't stand this. That's as if they would say: "Oh sorry, you can't play those games because you live in Europe."

I'm not saying I won't buy it ever, but IF this is true, there goes my 1st day buy.

this would kind of suck, though admittedly the only way it would cause me to enter spats of rage is if a new Jump Ultimate Stars came out for it

This is bad news for the importing gamers, but honestly as someone who never buys outside the country, it doesn't hurt me.