Talk:Regional lockout

"benefits"

i changed the heading of the "Benefits" section to "Advantages for Producers." it was absurd and laughable to have "Allows items to be launched at different times in different places, without allowing people to obtain the item 'ahead of time' by purchasing from abroad" and "Allows price differentiation between markets, thus increasing the potential revenue from worldwide sales" listed simply as "BENEFITS". they're obviously the advantages for the producers. if somebody wants to make a section for "Benefits for consumers", go right ahead, if you can possibly think of any. but don't forget this is an encyclopedia, not a jokebook. --which is why i changed the subheading. 128.119.236.133 01:51, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

First things first: Why?

Why does Sony want Region Locking for UMD movies anyway? They're the only distributors of UMD media, they have no competition to be feared, games are already region free, why are movies locked.------ 13:55, 13 September 2005 (UTC)darthanakin

This is a classic case of giving only one side of the argument. While I am indeed against regional lockout, the article lacks any mention whatsoever of its motives or advantages.

Is there any legitimate reason for regional lockout? The other day GameCentral (part of British Teletext) claimed in answer to someone's letter, "so that they can direct their country-specific advertising at you at a time of their choosing". But why would they want to do that? And even when they do, I fail to see how putting barriers in the way of import sales can be good business practice. -- Smjg 11:51, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I understand it to be about distribution rights. Reub2000 14:40, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Would you care to elaborate? -- Smjg 15:46, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The article says: "In addition, most handheld video game systems, including all Game Boy systems, are made region free because many people travel with their game systems."

I don't think this is exactly the reason. Handheld consoles use their own proprietary video display system, however video game consoles that use TVs are faced with the issue that some countries use 50Hz video systems (most PAL formats, and SECAM) and others use 60Hz systems (NTSC), so games have to be re-designed/re-programmed to be sold in certain countries. --Zilog Jones 23:11, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Indeed, the sentence about handhelds doesn't make sense at all. Anyway, 50Hz and 60Hz don't relate to the television formats. They are the frequencies of the European and American AC power supplies respectively. Moreover, PC games manage to work regardless of the AC frequency or the screen refresh rate. So why can't console games do the same? (For that matter, where did the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 et al fit into this equation?) -- Smjg 09:34, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The PAL and NTSC analog video signal formats use frequencies of 50hz and 60hz respectively, just like the AC power supplies (they're interlaced, so this translates to 25 fps and 30 fps respectively). The reason they decided to tie the frame rate to the AC power supply frequency is rather complicated, and I'm too tired to explain it, but I'm reasonably sure it's in the PAL and NTSC articles. The reason it works differently with PC games is that modern computer monitors (and graphics cards) are much more complicated, low-definition colour television is essentially 1950s technology, computer monitors have much higher resolution, and are capable of handling variable resolutions and refresh rates. Hopefully, the next generation of digital televisions will be able to handle both European and North American signal formats without problems.

True, but that doesn't by itself explain regional lockout, as at face value games would still work even if they would play more slowly and have black borders at the top and bottom (because of the differing number of lines, as the European SNES indeed did as far as the games I ever played go). -- Smjg 10:04, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that regional lockout is used for DVDs primarily because of exclusive sales and distribution contracts.

You mean so exclusive that anybody who buys a DVD enters into a contract, forbidding it to be posted across the ocean? I doubt they could ever have enforced such a thing if regional lockout didn't already exist. So, which came first, the chicken or the egg? -- Smjg 10:04, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

For the most part, DVD region lockouts are really just an industry tool to gain more profits through market segmentation and selective pricing. Whatever legitimate purposes do not outweigh this, BUT this does not change the fact that there are legitimate purposes. It's not just a matter of black borders or slower gameplay (not the case at all, since we're talking about the output video signal and not the actual game!), we're talking about a game that will just flat out not work because of the PAL-NTSC differences. From the company's perspective, it's a lot easier to forbid a user to do something than to let the user do something and then have the user flood the customer support department with complaints. --Code65536 7 July 2005 11:53 (UTC)

It's selective pricing. They can't possibly hope to sell a DVD for $40 in Angola but they sure as hell can get £20 for it in the United Kingdom. It allows them to sell globally without actually being subject to market forces. It's a great idea for studios, ultimately it just results in the consumer paying more. The PAL-NTSC argument is silly, as if that were the case clear warnings to the effect of "PAL game: WILL NOT WORK ON NTSC SYSTEM" on the product and similar markings on the device would do the job, at least, as well as the current regional encoding logos do! Nobody seems to have tremendous trouble understanding those.

This is one factor as to why regional lockout was created - it took time to convert games for 50Hz regions (as most games originate from 60Hz regions - Japan and the US), and publishers did not want people in 50Hz regions playing games (by importing) before they were officially released in their country. --Zilog Jones 23:11, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Do you mean they want people to experience games at full speed from the moment they get their hands on them? Even if they're being cruel to be kind in this respect, this doesn't seem to be always the case. Just before the Nintendo 64 was released in Europe, there were complaints that the games would run slower over here, as apparently a lot of developers hadn't bothered with the conversion process. And anyway, having to convert games strikes me as trying to fix the wrong problem - the real problem being a lack of portability in their means of developing the games in the first place. -- Smjg 09:34, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It has nothing to do with the speed of the game! Have you ever tried to watch a PAL video on an NTSC TV? Obviously, TVs that don't play both NTSC and PAL aren't very common these days, but when I was a kid (not long ago) I remember we had a dual-region (PAL/NTSC) VCR with a PAL-only TV. If you pressed the mode-change button on the video, it was unwatchable: the screen goes wack colours with a whole lot of noise and the sound changes pitch and everything. --Taejo 20:14, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes, there are other differences between NTSC and PAL besides the frame rate and even the number of lines. However, the picture processing unit is in the console, not in the game cartridges. If it weren't for regional lockout, a PAL console would be perfectly capable of playing games from Europe, US and Japan alike, rendering the picture and sound in PAL format regardless. -- Smjg 14:53, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about that. PAL runs at 50Hz and NTSC runs at 60Hz (There are other differences as well). Back in the bad old days, when videogame consoles were relatively low-power devices and the graphics system was intimately tied to the video refresh, the easiest way to approach the console design was to make the PAL system identical to the NTSC system (except for the colour system) and just slow the CPU's clock down by 1/6. That way, all the fixed 2D sprite animations and tightly-coded processes in the games would still run smoothly, if not quickly. Nezuji 07:05, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm puzzled - surely it's easier and cheaper to put the graphics rendering hardware in the console rather than on each game cartridge individually? -- Smjg 16:51, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Sorry! I meant that I wasn't sure about a game working flawlessly on another region's hardware if lockout were removed from the equation. Nezuji 13:10, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Nowdays there isn't -- stricly speaking -- any need to do things this way, but old habits die hard, and introducing micro-pauses coupled with a reduction in the vertical resolution is still the simplest way to convert an NTSC game to PAL. Otherwise, you have to start worrying about things like how many polygons you're drawing per frame, and how long it takes to draw those polygons in a higher vertical resolution. Thankfully, with the release of Metroid Prime 2 on the GCN, it seems that developers are starting to realise that PAL 60 (a 60Hz signal with PAL colour encoding) is fine for PAL mass-market (I have a 30-year-old TV which handles PAL 60 just fine), not to mention the proliferation of NTSC-compatible PAL televisions (I don't know that it's even possible to buy a new PAL TV that isn't NTSC compatible) so this entire issue may soon become a thing of the past. Nezuji 07:05, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

I see. But like I said, there ought to be portability in the means of developing them in the first place. Just as the C runtime library makes it possible to write code that compiles on many different OSs, it ought to be straightforward to code up videogames such that they will compile straight into smoothly-running, full speed and full screen NTSC and PAL versions alike. Most simply, it would mean making use of symbolic constants that translate as "CPU speed", "video refresh rate", "horizontal resolution" and "vertical resolution". -- Smjg 16:51, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree that there should be portability. This sort of thing would be a big step toward a platform-independant game format. Unfortunately, there isn't any simple formula (that I've seen, anyway) for adjusting polygon counts and other rendering-related items based on refresh rate and resolution. Besides which, generating polygon meshes for game models is a rather involved process, and console games ship with their models constructed from a fixed number of polygons, not as mathematical models. So-called "Level of Detail" systems have been built into many 3D games which substitute lower poly-count models for high poly-count models when they appear small on the screen (i.e. at a great distance from the camera), but more or less all of these work with a discrete number of pre-built models, not by altering models on-the-fly. Interestingly, relating back to the issue of movies, there is more than one digital motion picture codec which records motion in terms of differences over time as opposed to differences between frames, being therefore essentially "frameless", and replaying smoothly at any framerate. Nezuji 13:10, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

So rendering just the right number of polygons is their way of regulating the speed of a game? Seems strange. I'd think a timer to be a much more reliable way of regulating speed. -- Smjg 14:11, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

I know I'm joining into this discussion late, but while PAL/NTSC differences affect the video output, they are not entirely the same as general regional lockout. Japanese games, which run on the same NTSC output as the United States and Canada, often contain lockout which prevents them from being easily played by those in North America.

DVD Regional Lockouts

One of the key reasons for DVD regional lockouts is the fact that studios often release films in theatres outside the U.S. at later dates then in the U.S. In some cases, a movie is allready appearing on DVD at the same time it's appearing in theatres overseas. Thus to protect foreign ticket sales then lockout region 1 DVD's overseas. I would also think that regional distibution contracts would also play a part as a regional DVD distributer would not want allot of people buying from outside distributer and cutting it out of it's share. --Cab88 16:34, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If for no good reason some company is against releasing stuff at the same time everywhere, that's their problem. They shouldn't turn it into ours.

OTOH there may be work to be done, such as translating the product into different languages, which may delay releases in some places. But still, can't exclusive distribution contracts be on a per-language basis? If something is released first in English, then in the time that it takes to prepare a Japanese translation, anybody in Japan who buys the English language version from overseas isn't cutting the local distributor out of its share of sales of the forthcoming Japanese language version. (Can this argument be adapted to a system where versions can be multilingual?) -- Smjg 14:44, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Are DVD Regional Lockouts legal anywhere? I think all WTO governments except New Zealand allow CCS compliant DVD players to be sold within their borders, but they are illegal in both the USA and EU under their respective fair trade statutes. In fact, CCS cartel has been sued in civil court in California by a number of manufacturers for their violations of the Organized Crime and other federal statutes. I believe the fact that regional lockouts are criminal in all capitalist countries should be noted in the article. Zenyu 21:36, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

Comments

Are we going to expand this article then -- it seems quite short for such a topic, but I don't know if it arrived that way after long arguments?

Does anyone know details of how the EU free-trade laws affected region coding? I heard that region-coded DVDs would be breaking EU law in this regard, but perhaps it was dropped when 'region-free' players became widely-available enough for it not to be an issue

Should this article cover websites which restrict access from certain places, or give different content to different places?

And do we only discuss things which 'lock out' certain locations rather than offering them an alternative? (e.g. if there's a UK version of something and a US version, is it lockout to not offer the UK version in the US?) Is Apple Computer regional lockout-ing me from buying a keyboard with a dollar sign in the right place? Are weather websites regional lockout-ing me from seeing Mexican weather when they detect I live in the UK and show a Glasgow weather forecast?

Ojw 2 July 2005 14:54 (UTC)

I think the term "lockout" only applies if some technical method is used to prevent goods bought in one location from being usable in another, so if for instance Apple computers sold in the UK couldn't be connected to US-style Apple keyboards, and this was an intentional choice to prevent you from doing this, then it would be lockout. Lack of availability, or incidental reasons why it wouldn't work, shouldn't be lockout.

The EU free trade laws only require you to be able to freely buy goods in one EU country from another: as all EU countries are in the same region, I don't believe DVD region coding is considered a restraint on trade. I'm not an expert on EU law, though.

A couple of things that do strike me as odd about this article:

Ability to restrict content which may be illegal in some countries (e.g. Nazi material in Europe, or pornography in the Middle East)

I live in the UK, which is part of Europe, and Nazi material isn't illegal here. I know it is in France, and suspect it might be in Germany, but don't believe the rest of Europe has such laws?

Nazi material is illegal in most of the countries directly affected by the holocaust, which includes lare swathes of central Europe. The UK and Ireland are pretty unique in fearing infringement of basic rights more than the threat of bogeymen. At least, until recently.

When distribution contracts for each area are awarded to different companies, it allows a company to avoid "stepping on someone else's toes" (e.g. not displaying maps of england for fear of upsetting the Ordnance Survey)

Why would showing a map of England upset the OS? And what has that got to do with distribution contracts in different areas? I suspect the author of that comment misunderstood something, or I don't understand his intentions.

Effect on society and economic

I have added articles about effect on society and economic.

For the other part of the article, I truly believe that the clear advantages for consumers can only be pointed out by consumers, and the clear advantages of region locker's can only be pointed out by region lockers or manufacturers (which do usually not speak the truth on places like this, because they are biased with their NDA's and economic interests).

--Thedogg 04:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

I have toned down the section on social impact. This is an article in an encyclopedia, not a manifesto against regional encoding, no matter how tempting it may be to make it such.

Splitting the DVD region lockout from this article

IMHO, the DVD region lockout is unique enough that it deserves its own article. It's very difficult, I think, to have a coherent discussion about DVD region lockout when it is mixed in with other things like games. There are a lot of DVD-specific issues like the RPC Phase I and Phase II requirements of the CSS license and the entire relationship between the CSS license and region lockout for DVDs. I think that, ultimately, this will probably give this entire article a lot more coherency if its separated from gaming issues.

--Code65536 03:19, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Import gamers having "buyer's remorse"? News to me.

Er...could someone get a source for this claim about import gamers having buyer's remorse? I'm an importer. I'm /glad/ that my games do not contain the localization edits that are rampantly found in translated games. There are also plenty of other reasons for importing besides getting a game before its local release, it seems to me that whoever wrote that paragraph knew very little of import gaming. A large percentage of games that are perfectly enjoyable aren't even released outside of Japan. Occasionally, a die-hard fan of a series that is given local releases will buy both versions to complete their collection. It's also a popular practice among those who study Japanese or speak it fluently (me again). As I hinted at earlier, many importers also do not want games that have been given purposely inaccurate translations or re-dubbed voice acting. -November 14, 2005 (Not a registered user)

Nov22nd -- I agree. I came to this talk page looking to see if anyone else had mentioned it. It doesn't belong in an encyclopedic article.

The idea sometimes contradicts itself

I understand that the idea of regional lockout comes from wanting to vary prices in different countries (presumably due to different currencies), and so make more income. However, especially with video games, you have the issue of games that are not released in some countries, which are given regional lockouts to prevent people from those sountries from playing them, even though the game isn't available there. This, aside from being horreundously unfair, contradicts the whole purpose of regional lockouts.

It can be argued (quite strongly in fact) that this encourages piracy, especially emulation (which, ironically, the companies that cause this are firmly opposed to). This isn't mentioned in the article so far, and I really think it ought to. --12:58, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

While I agree, I'm not sure how it could be written into an encyclopedic article without coming off biased. Another thing about regional lockout: Determined people will always find ways to circumvent regional lockout (modchips, boot disks, software hacks). Often, these methods of circumvention also allow a user to run unauthorized copies, which could add to negative effects. People aren't going to stop wanting imported games, which are the main reason for these methods to exist. (The "homebrewn" software community also has a legitimate need for these methods, however). Alcy 02:48, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

EU

I have removed the reference to the European Union being one region, as since the acession of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (which as former USSR states use region 5) there have been two seperate regions in the European Union.

Nintendo DS

Should there be a mention on this page that while the DS will play games from any of the three main computer game regions (EU, US & JP), games from different regions are not compatable with each other for multi player link up? JP Godfrey (Talk to me) 13:37, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Error: PAL game not working in NTSC system

Hi! I'm kind of new here, and I just came across this article. Near the bottom it said that you can cut off the pins that block a PAL or NTSC-J N64 cartridge from being inserted into an American system, you can play it. Well, I did just that. However, when I put my game into the N64 and turn the power on, nothing happens. I cleaned it many times and nothing happened still. I tried other (American) games, and they all worked. Why is this happening? Is it because I have an older TV that doesn't support PAL hookup? Should I move to a different TV? What's happening?

Marikthechao 23:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC) Marikthechao Marikthechao 23:13, 7 November 2006 (UTC)