Friendly wrote:The correct reaction would be not to buy the game out of principle, to show your appreciation towards Atlus for ending more than six years of region-free gaming out of greed.
Online protests/petitions are useless. Voting with your wallet is the only way.
The problem is that there's no good way for "region locking of Persona 4" to show up on Atlus's bottom line. At best they'll have projected sales vs. actual sales, which won't point them in any direction unless there's a massive shortfall (i.e. bigger than can be explained by an overoptimistic sales projection) coupled with massive public outcry. This sort of thing has always been a major shortcoming of voting with your wallet: it's entirely possible -- even likely -- that your vote never gets counted. Even if some people send emails, Atlus has no idea what percentage that is of people who refused to buy because of the region locking.
Besides, the entire console model has been anti-consumer bullshit from the start. The console vendors have always sought to be in charge of what you are and aren't allowed to play on "their system". With the first consoles, Atari et. al. tried to control publishing solely by keeping the programming and cartridge design information secret. When that failed, digital signatures of various sorts came about pretty quickly (Nintendo 1985, Atari 1986, Sega 1988). Now we're reduced to arguing over what particular functionality those signatures should be used to control, rather than whether that kind of control is justified at all. It's understandable that gamers don't really want to confront this, since the only legal alternative it leaves open basically amounts to "don't play video games".
Friendly wrote:This also doesn't bode well for PS4, or future PS Vita games.
Don't be too shocked if PS4 and Xbox 720 won't even play a game from disc without the console being registered to a region-locked PSN/XBL account. That's basically the direction the industry is going. Or perhaps, like we're seeing here, they'll start out a little looser and clamp it down later on when the publishers start getting restless. If they're feeling really generous, they won't use
BCA serial numbers to tie the disc to your console/account (the big PC publishers would probably have done this already if DVD drives were guaranteed to read them). Remember, they're not keeping discs around because they like the idea of you having a distinct physical copy, they're just doing it because discs still get more throughput than CDNs to a lot of places.
Friendly wrote:It's really unfortunate that Sony didn't just remove region locking altogether.
Even if they had removed it altogether, they could have just added it again in a firmware update. If they really wanted to, they could even apply it retroactively since the region is encoded in each game's product number (BLJS, BLAS, BLUS, BLES, etc.).
