I'm surprised that Nintendo fans can totally write off the importance of region locking considering the fiasco with the Operation Rainfall games. I was so glad there was a way to get around the region locking of the Wii, and I'll be really glad when someone figures out something like that for the WiiU in case NoA decides to start fucking up again.

I've actually used the lack of region locking on other consoles quite a few times.  Let me get Malicious months before I otherwise would have on PSN, I sent a NA copy of Disgaea 3 to a friend in England which let him play that months or maybe even years early as well.  Heck I'm not even sure that game is out there now.  So yes, it's not something that will affect sales, and it's certainly not the new Xbox One or 599 dollars, but it's not a meaningless feature either.  

Lack of localization is giving region-locking a bad rep... Especially when it comes to games between America and Europe. Now I see this affects the minority, importers, but this also affects the the minority within the minority, region-to-region travelers! I really feel the disgust for them when I heard the 3DS is getting region-locked. Nintendo, that's a handheld, portable, something you go just about anywhere with!

Nintendo did promised that they will do more localization, I'm just hoping they are actually committed to do so!

As osed125 said, even if Nintendo removed region locking we would only see an insignificant bump in Wii U sales. I find the article to be sensationalism. Nintendo stance on region locking does not even begin to compare to how horrible MS policies were, but I expect people are going to compare the two on the same level and potentially say that what Nintendo is doing is worse.

I hope they will remove region lock, because I want to be able to play the Japanese and PAL exclusives.

It is annoying to people. Even though it's a small user base. I had to go through the annoying process of hacking my Wii so I could play my Naruto Fighting games from GC and Wii that weren't brought here. Since they disabled Action Replay. And bought the Wii DBZ games from japan. Because the original music wasn't included. Those you don't need to know that much Japanese to play through.

I think the gaming community just got the taste now after Xbox One. They realise that if they create enough commotion company's might change their policy's.

I see this as a good and bad thing.

Wii U? the new xbox one? does this mean the gamepad is watching me? Will i be charged to play online? i want a refund.

It doesnt matter if they remove region locking or not as it won't matter.

Here is the reason why, I know a person who bought Ninja Gaiden from UK and in Australia he had to create a new nintendo connect account in uk so he could get the game to work. So he had dual accounts. Then when his console messed up during a firmware update Nintendo had issues fixing it as it had two accounts.

First step is to centralise the account system, ONE for everything in the world and only then removing region locking will make sense. Otherwise people will have 3-4 accounts on their console one for each region lol.

I just think region locking is a shit concept over all, so Nintendo is shit for perpetuating it in games when SOny dumped it for PS3 and MS has now dumped it for Xb One.

VHS never had region locking (as long as you had a VHS machine capable to playing PAL and NTSC you were sweet), music CDs aren't region locked. Movies are still region locked (BR and DVD) and that's shit, but at least with DVDs most DVD players only required you to enter a code using your remote control and you had an all regions DVD player.

But region locking as also nothing like the big evil that MS was trying to pull with it's DRM shite. So no Wii U is not becoming the new Xb One.