Reason for Console Regions?

I'd like to know why too. From my perspective, a consumer, it's retarded. I want to use my DVDs from whatever their origin is.

My stepfather asked a shop in Stockholm if they had modchips for Playstation 2. The clerk got pissed, just cause you can play burned copies with such chips. But the modchips make the console region-free, so you can also play imported games and watch imported DVD-movies, which was the main reason my stepfather asked.

Unfortunately the majority of people buying modchips probably aren't after it for these rather legitimate reasons I don't know about all consoles, but some have software you can buy to let you play import games. I know the gamecube has "freeloader", Dreamcast has "Utopia Boot CD", and with the good old disc swapping technique on the PS1 you can play both imports and copies.

I chipped my psx, ps2, dreamcast so I could buy games that I knew were never coming to the USA or would take forever to get published here. I used to spend so much money at NCS imports. hehe

Making the PSP and GBA games region free was the best idea for sony and nintendo, because it allows gamers to play games from other countries of the same frequency. (NTSC & PAL). Unfortunately, the movies aren't the same way as games probably because its cheaper in some countries than others maybe. Distribution rights etc.

If i could mod the ps3 to play import I would, but with the problems of piracy i doubt Sony is going to let their baby become a region free system.

First off, Region Coding and Region Lock are two different things, region coding is what we find from DVD movies, and it is designed after the region lock of the video game industry, mainly used in consoles.

Region coding is used to prevent various materials to be sold in other countries where laws differ, examples are banned material from various regions, like pornography in Middle East, Pokemon in Saudi Arabia and Nazi material in Europe.

Localization is one reason aswell, studios tend to make localized versions of movies for different regions, they can thusly control the release date, content and price for each region.

Region lock works prettymuch the same way but is more stricktly controlled because there are only one hardware developer per console, the recent ESRB rating scandals are a perfect example of why region locking was invented in the first place.

And usually games are distributed by different companies to different regions, which prevents companies from "competing" with each other in cross region distributing.

So long story short, both region cogind and region locking are invented to prevent illegal content being distributed and more viable localization and pricing per region.

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Making the PSP and GBA games region free was the best idea for sony and nintendo, because it allows gamers to play games from other countries of the same frequency. (NTSC & PAL).

The NTSC and PAL are one of the reasons why region coding is used, to prevent content looking different in different regions, so GBA, DS and PSP can be region free because they have their own screens and games are developed to look right on them, so this ofcourse removes the fear of games not working properly on different regions and different systems.

6 TVs?

Basicly its done to control the realeases of games and movies.

While we see almost instant global releases these days, not so long ago sertain movies and games could be released a year after its released in another region.

They simply don't want u to get the game or see the movie before they feel like it. Without these regions, Europeans for example could buy american dvd's of a movie while it was not in the movies theatre there yet making the owners of these theatre's angry.

So the real reason like alot of other stuf is : MONEY

Quote from Bluestrike

So the real reason like alot of other stuf is : MONEY

That is the easy answer, say what could not possibly come to answer of money in a capitalistic society of the modern western civilization? There just is not such a thing as commonwealth anymore, it is just a monetary gain of specific group, but means to gain the hold are what we are studying here, wy do use a means of region control. I think 99, 99% of everyone at Mapcore realized that money was behind everything before this thread was even started.

Regions like those on DVDs cover releases (like stated above), while NTSC and PAL are just encoding standards. They're not specifically designed to prevent you from selling merchandise to other countries, or to get more money from you when you move to another country.

I'd be neat if there was just one of these standards, but that'd be like asking EVERYONE to use OGG instead of MP3, or AVI instead of MPG, or instead of