Ooooh. I'm so envious.
I still have a bit to wait for this. But then again, I'm neck deep in Dark Cloud 2 so I wouldn't be able to start it right away anyways.

And then there's the other zelda games I got by preordering... and I still haven't even thouht about getting xenosaga yet... augh... too many games!

are there any good import games for the gamecube that are easy to understand?

isn't the main reason for region protection to do with copyright and the differences between laws and various legalities in each country which mean they have to produce different versions?

I can understand that.

I think you are right or at least close, ed. I was under the impression that it is similar to the anime importing issue. Until a title is licensed for sale in a foreign land, there is no one to receive money for the license agreement (which everything has, video game or not). When you purchase an import game from a local game store, it is similar to buying a used cd. The Game store makes money, Nintendo or Sony or MS, does not. However, what if you order it directly from the company, a legal distributer or in a phyisical store, as Jane did? I don't see how importing rules would apply to that situation. If you moved for one place to another, you could still play your system (PAL and power standards permitting). I am a supporter of modded systems and people having the right to reverse-enginer products. It's odd that there are many brands of DVD player and PC, but is only one PS2. Maybe this is why I get frustrated with the Apple paradigm. ;)

I actually wrote about this on my site
Here is my brief guide on how to get around regional restrictions on video games.
PSOne: Get a boot disk
Gameboy and GBA: There are no regional restrictions.
PS2: You will have to get it modded with a chip and I suggest you go to a professional unless you have a degree in electrical engineering.
Gamecube: They just released a boot disk WOO!
Xbox: There is no reason due to the fact that there are no good Japanese only Xbox games.
Dreamcast: use a boot disk.
SNES: Break of the tabs in your cartridge port to "circumsize it". Needle-nose pliers work great.
NES: Have to use an adaptor,
N64: Have to get an extender board adaptor.
Saturn: Use a GameShark or GS clone
Genesis: use a rounded file to widen the cartridge slot so that the Japanese Mega Drive game will fit.

I have been enjoying King of Fighters 2001 Import Dreamcast

Ben I think some of your suspicions are correct - region encoding is about who gets money from which country. In the case of movies, I think most large Hollywood studios enjoy region-encoding so they can control which countries get copies of their movies, when.

I do want to understand the video game publisher's point of view for region encoding - perhaps an interview is in order.

grrr... I pre-ordered Datel's FreeLoader from Lik-Sang back in September. When they got shut down and then later returned, my order was cancelled and I was refunded my money. I assumed that Datel had just given up on the project (it suffered several delays). Now that it apparently exists, though, Lik-Sang is mysteriously offline. Sigh... all I want to do is play my Japanese version of Animal Trainer.

d'oh... I appear to be out of the loop. A quick check online showed that they are in stock at my local funcoland (where I'll be going in about 10 seconds). I do wonder what happened to lik-sang though...

The region encoding is two-fold.

The first, which has been discussed here already, is who gets what money. The analogy of buying an imported game here and Nintendo (assuming it was a Nintendo game) doesn't get any money is slightly false. They got their money when the store here originally imported the game. But for the most part, companies without multinational headquarters require out-of-country vendors to license the titles and distribute them for them. Even Nintendo wants to track how well Zelda sells here, so they make sure Nintendo of America tracks the sales of the U.S. version.

The other reason why they regionalize the games is due to content and support. It would be next to impossible for a company like Tomy to offer any kind of support for a title here in the states. They have no way to even make sure that it gets put on the right store shelves, let alone take calls from people who are having problems with the game. Then there's the whole debacle of regionalizing the language on the game (let's face it, we don't know Japanese and the Japanese don't know English), the re-printing of the manual, case, and disk, etc. That cost shouldn't be considered into the original release of the game. If Zelda printed and sold 1 million units in Japan, and printed another 1 million units but only sold 5,000 units here in the U.S., and all of that financing came out of one source, the game would probably be considered a failure (stretching things here, yes), and a second game wouldn't be made. With regionalization, they can determine that Zelda wasn't right for the U.S. audience, write off the loss of the U.S. game while maintaining a high profit margin on the Japanese game, and could then decide to either tweak the next Zelda for U.S. audiences, or just not publish a version to the U.S. in the future, thereby ensuring profitability.

Man alive do I love the gamecube, there are really a lot of great import titles coming out at the moment. .. And I must say that gamecube, right next to GBA is one of the most import-friendly systems out there right now.

Unfortunately for me I couldn't wait to get back on American soil to get a Cube when I was in Japan. Months later, I couldn't wait for the freeloader so I opted for the hardware mod.

But anyway, I only have to wait outside next to my mailbox for 12 more days for the Japanese SoulCalibur 2 to arrive from its voyage across the sea. Happyness really knows no bounds, or regions. Or maybe that should be Happyness is region free...ok I'll be quiet now.

"perhaps because the game is aimed at children."

Ouch. That hurt.

Thanks for that explanation Bowler - that makes some sense to me. Differences between markets (Europe/Asia/Americas) fascinate me - what genres/games sell where, and how companies localize. I guess if people want to import, it's up to them to strategize and work to find the games, to pay extra to have them, and to suffer mods and boot disks to get them to work. That's the price of being cross-cultural today. Jane's vision in her article is the glee over having solved that particular game puzzle. And I wonder how Nintendo would feel about her little victory over their region encoding scheme? Probably they feel as though she is a tiny enough minority that they don't have to worry about it.

Still, they could just publish versions in Japanese, and publish versions in English, sell them in the respective countries, and track sales from stores and distributors, based on language. Why bother encoding the devices? I guess they assume that fans will be so eager to get the new game they'll buy whatever language they can and then maybe they'll have a bad experience. That seems a little bit silly on the part of the publishers - to assume that their fans are stupid and prone to disappointment.

Region coding (for video games, or DVD-movies, or whatever) is an artificial obstacle placed to try to protect one of the things a distributor pays for when he licenses the distribution rights to a product for his local region: exclusivity.

Zelda is an odd case because that particular game was produced in-house by Nintendo. Imagine a fictional GameCube game called "Floogle's Adventures," created by Studio A in Japan. Studio A publishes the game in Japan and pays a royalty to Nintendo on every cartridge they sell for the right to use the Nintendo format and name. They aren't big enough to deal directly with the overseas market, though, so Company B buys the rights to the game for US/Canada, translates the game, instruction booklet and packaging into English, and releases it in the US. They probably pay a lump sum plus a royalty per game sold to Studio A, and they also pay the per-cartridge royalty to Nintendo. Now Corporation C buys the rights for the UK, France, Germany and Spain - another lump sum to Studio A and they produce a 4-language version of the game that is shipped to European stores. What they absolutely do not want to see is stores in their zone competing by selling the US or Japanese versions of the game - they paid for exclusivity in their region. If the dollar happened to be weak and the US version of the game wholesaled for less than the Euro version, then stores would be stocking the US version - and Corporation C is getting the shaft even though Nintendo still gets their cut, and Studio A still gets their money. Region coding is simply there to discourage retailers from stocking the "wrong" version for their geographic location.

This has always been a problem with books, and if there was any technical way to make a book published in the UK unreadable in the US, they would have been doing it for a century already. I learned to read on my parents' collection of Penguin paperbacks that were all marked, "Not For Sale In Canada" - Penguin would buy the publication rights for the UK and most of the Commonwealth (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) but Canada was usually granted to whatever publisher bought the rights for the US.

I have argued vociferously against regionalisation in the trade press for the games industry; I just thought I'd take a moment to raise a few points:

1. GameBoy cartridges are not regionally encoded. This is clear evidence that regional encoding is not a requirement.
2. It is the minority hardcore who wish to buy import games, not the majority casual market. Therefore, publishers could produce an add-on product (much like Freeloader) which bypasses regionalisation legally. This would only slightly skew sales figures, but would allow hype for a game to run in advance of release, which is beneficial (plus make the platform holder more money for the add-on).

You may note that in Australia, Sony lost their court case against mod chips, because the Australian courts recognised that breaking regionalisation was in the best interests of the Australian consumers.

There's more info in one of my rants:

http://www.ihobo.com/forum/articles/rant_free.html

TO
XBOX GAME COMPANY

RESPECTED PERSON,
While watching the computer I saw a XBOX GAME on your web site. I am a student studying in first year science and have become keen intersted in the same game, but being a financial position I can not afford and purchase it. I shall be very thankful, if you kindly send me the same game free of charge on the following mailing address.

YOURS TRULY
NAJEEBULLAH SHAIKH
ADDRESS:
B-8 Wapda Water Wing Colony
Hussainabad Hyderabad

While you're at it, RESPECTED PERSON, I'd also like a copy of XBOX GAME. Send two to Najeebullah and I'll pick mine up next time I am in Hyderabad.

Sorry. About region encoding: I used to go to a local video game store ("System88") at a mall near my house several years ago. This store stocked Japanese import Playstation games, long before the mod chip community took off (this was like 1995, and you had to swap import PSX games during load to get them to boot). The place charged exorbitant prices, and I always wondered what the legality of such a place actually is.

Sony or Nintendo or whomever can create a copy protection scheme and claim that it is necessary to secure their viability in the market. Under the DMCA, it is thus illegal in America to devise a means to circumvent that copy protection method. However, is it legal to import and sell Japanese games at higher cost? I know there are a bunch of shady web-based import places around, but System88 is the only import retail place I've ever seen. It would seem that no company has the right to control which of their products are exported by independent retailers (which is probably why region encoding exists in the first place). Is it, then, a breach of the DMCA to devise methods for playing imported games? After all, you imported the game and paid for its transport (directly or indirectly), and it's not intended for the American market. How can companies argue that you are thus affecting their local sales?

waka

I believe that the regionalization of game consoles is also intended to artificially inflate the demand for them. If a customer wishes to play both Japan-region games and America-region games, for example, then he is forced to buy not one, but TWO consoles.

My problem is not that I can buy a game cheaper from another source, but that the game, WRC II Extreme, probably won't ever be offered in my region because the low US sales of the first WRC game don't justify the expense of publishing for the US market.

So these regional controls are costing the game designers their US sales because they would rather protect the future rights of a ficticious company than let us pay a premium to import the game ourselves. Regardless of its legality, it just isn't good business practice.

I am an American living in Japan and am looking at game systems. I would like to be able to play American games but also play Japanese DVDs (as the Japanese DVDs are all but identical to the American releases except for having Japanese subtitles and being at the store across the street). I have heard that the Xbox is regionally coded for games but not for DVDs, ie, I could buy a Japanese Xbox and play the Japanese movies but then import American games as well as buy Japanese games. Do you guys know if this is true?

Dear sir /madam,
i am very happy to write you this letter.how is life in europe?i know by the grace of lord almighty you are as fit as a fiddle.
please sir the reason why i am writting you this letter is thet i want your company to bear me a charity to bring / send me a free gameboy colour advance.
please sir /madam send it to

EMMANUEL ADJEI
CALL OF HOPE INT SCH
P.O.BOX NT66 YENNYAWOSO - KUMASI
GHANA /(WEST AFRICA)
MAY GOD BLESS YOU.
GOOD LUCK / BYE

Dear sir /madam,
i am very happy to write you this letter.how is life in europe?i know by the grace of lord almighty you are as fit as a fiddle.
please sir the reason why i am writting you this letter is thet i want your company to bear me a charity to bring / send me a free gameboy colour advance.
please sir /madam send it to

EMMANUEL ADJEI
CALL OF HOPE INT SCH
P.O.BOX NT66 YENNYAWOSO - KUMASI
GHANA /(WEST AFRICA)
MAY GOD BLESS YOU.
GOOD LUCK / BYE

Dear sir /madam,
i am very happy to write you this letter.how is life in europe?i know by the grace of lord almighty you are as fit as a fiddle.
please sir the reason why i am writting you this letter is thet i want your company to bear me a charity to bring / send me a free gameboy colour advance.
please sir /madam send it to

EMMANUEL ADJEI
CALL OF HOPE INT SCH
P.O.BOX NT66 YENNYAWOSO - KUMASI
GHANA /(WEST AFRICA)
MAY GOD BLESS YOU.
GOOD LUCK / BYE

reply me as soon as possible.

reply me as soon as possible.