Acosta said:
It's helpful for us, that is the point I guess, it makes our life easier in order to import shoot'em ups.
That's all well and good but guess what? Japan doesn't care. Back in the Nintendo/Sega days tabs were stuck in the console to keep Japanese games from fitting into US machines. People sawed those tabs off and went on. Mega-drive games came in different shapes to keep people from sticking them into their Genesis so they used a game genie to bypass that and then they had to start using game genie codes to unlock later games.
For the 32-bit gen we had to buy cartridges, mod consoles, and/or swap-discs in order to bypass region-locks and even that wasn't 100% guaranteed. Not to mention the fact that new versions of consoles were released that tried to do away with these.
Last gen we had to do all of those things again, sure for some systems it was easier than others but in the process we saw an even greater surge in piracy. Someone could take an Xbox and with a bit of work they had a console capable of playing games from 20 or so other consoles. Somebody out there got word of this and they were pissed off, so...
Here we are today with a 360 you can't even open without MS eating your children and drowning your pets, a Wii that constantly updates so who knows how long that Freeloader is good for, and for the PS3 that Sony has...well..it seems like they've given up the fight and they don't care what you do with the system(or maybe they're simply going on a case-by-case basis) On the other hand they sure hate it when you mod their PSPs.
But do know this. Ever read a notice on a Japanese game that reads something to the effect of "It is unlawful to play this game outside of Japan."? You've probably seen this before. Most publishers don't particularly care about the status of Grey Market imports because hey it's extra money right? There should be no issue with people importing games or consoles or whatever? So why is that lik-sang got shut down? The law might get bended often but eventually companies have to put their foot down.
And yeah maybe there's that little thing about piracy. For some reason publishers hate it when people get games without paying for them, and modded/region-free consoles are usually targeted first. Sure Sony's system might be region-free for PS3 releases, but it damn sure isn't for PS2 and PS1 cause y'know why? Because PS1/PS2 titles don't come on blu-rays and until blu-ray burners are less than $100 you can bet that's part of the reason why Sony went with them.
I don't have any formal education on the matter and I'm probably making this all up but if you really think Japan cares about importers they probably would have made the entire process of playing import games just a little bit easier.
