Agreed, but those aren't necessarily factors under your control. That's my essential point. If everything is in place for you to compete fairly and you still can't compete, I have no objections. The problem is that I've encountered dozens of circumstances out of a company's direct control that could stand in the way of you hitting the optimal release window.
I don't care about that. If they can't make it work in a timely or cost-effective fashion, then consumers should have the right to take their business elsewhere. Region locking just enforces regional price fixing. In my view, it should be illegal because it's anti-competitive and in some instances, especially the price of Japanese games, is blatant profiteering.
This makes me wonder: I'm coming from the standpoint that Atlus's customer in Europe is Zen, not the people who'll finally play the game. Those people should be regarded as Zen's customers, not Atlus's.
Perhaps that's a flawed line of reasoning, but in doing so that does naturally make me sympathise with Zen as a customer.
(Clearly, the solution we all really want is for Atlus to get around to opening an office over here like they should have done years ago!)
Again, I don't care about Zen. Atlus are hiring them to bring the game over here, but if Zen are incapable, for whatever reasons (whether they're out of their control or not), then I should have the right to go elsewhere. If they can't compete with imports, then they're doing something wrong on their end. As a customer, all I care about is getting the game in a timely fashion.
As it stands, I'm probably not going to bother with P4 Arena now. I was prepared to wait for the PAL release to encourage quicker Atlus releases (I did the same with Persona 2 on PSP, because that was barely a month late), but if they're going to tell me what I can and can't do on a system that has, for six years, not had such a limitation, then I'm out. I'm not a pirate, and I'm not a modder (of PS3, anyway -- I'll willingly mod region locked systems to play legitimate imports). All I want is to be able to buy legitimate software and use it, but it seems even that's not good enough for these companies. Appalling.
Also, for what it's worth, Zen aren't a customer of Atlus. They've made a deal to localise and distribute Atlus USA's game, and this isn't a seller-customer relationship between the two companies. It's very unlikely that Zen paid a lump sum and just left it at that. Zen are just acting as a middle man to sell Atlus' software, and Atlus will see a cut from each game sold. And if Zen are not capable of releasing the game at or around the same time as the US version, then that should be their problem, and not mine.