Do You Care about Nintendo 3DS Region Lock?

We all know that beautiful New 3DS and New 3DS XL will be coming to the west in 2015. We just were not sure if it was going to be region locked, a practice which most hardware makers are passing on now. Well, not surprisingly, Nintendo has no plans to ditch region locking. Here is an unofficial translation of an interview, compiled by Gamespot:

“The game business has a history of taking a very long time with localization among other things, such as having to deal with various issues of marketing in each particular country, or games that have made use of licensed content that did not apply globally, and had all kinds of circumstances, so to say, that region-locking has existed due to circumstances on the sellers’ side rather than for the sake of the customers. In the history of game consoles, that is the current situation. As for what should be done going forward, if unlocked for the benefit of the customers, there may also be a benefit for us. Conversely, unlocking would require various problems to be solved, so while I can’t say today whether or not we intend to unlock, we realize that it is one thing that we must consider looking to the future.”

So what do we make of this? Well, to be fair to Nintendo, they are not completely rejecting the idea of unlocked devices, which is a positive, especially for individuals who want to import Japan only titles. Unfortunately, abandoning region lock IS in the best interest of the consumer; perhaps Nintendo just hasn’t realized that yet.

It is interesting that when I look at the people who actually complain about region lock, that it is primarily journalists. Do you as the consumer still care about region lock?