Why was region locking so prevalent in home consoles back in the day?
>>10886968It was usually to prevent Japanese consumers from importing games from abroad in order to pay lower prices. This is the same reasoning why music albums from international artists release special editions of their albums for the Japanese market which often include alternative versions of songs or sometimes entire songs that aren't on the album in other regions.To use the Super Famicom as an example, games were around 10,000 yen new (not always, but many were) but an American copy was like $50. With the exchange rate at the time you could have just imported a western copy and saved yourself $40. Some people did this anyway but they had to import the system (problematic because of voltage differences) or get an adapter of some sort (which was rare at the time).
>>10886968https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETxmCCsMoD0
>>10886982why is software in Japan so expensive?and if the answer to that is "because they like it that much"... why do they like it that much?
>>10887992Because everything was so expensive.
'cause they didn't want you playing Japanese imports with naughty content that Howard Lincoln had to protect America's youth from
>>10888220Soon you won't be able to buy retro vidya from Japan, unless you pay an extraordinary amount. They are catching on finally, kek.
>>10888242Indeed. If the moonbuck continues its freefall a busted up loose famicom cart will cost 100 billion yen. Which will be US$20. Almost enough to buy small fries at McD.
>>10886968So that you only bought official releases. Not hard.
Because people were anal about "Da unregulated imports! Dats theft!" shit back then.They still warn you about it today, but ultimately no one really cares
>>10888905What's this?
>>10889271A "I know what you did" style message the dev left in Mickey Mania if you did the region switch mod on a Genesis to play the Japanese version of the game in PAL consoles.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDgD-_6eZEM
>>10888905With this it made sense because NTSC games would glitch on a PAL machine and vice versa.
>>10889019>Because people were anal about "Da unregulated imports! Dats theft!" shit back thenthat was back when they banned people from importing Japanese cars made newer than 25 years ago
>be britbong in the 1980s>someone shoots JR>the episode revealing the shooter is flown in with armed security>despite the episode having already aired in the US months/years prior>the rest of Europe gets it after us tooSame situation with games, usually Japan first then North America then anywhere else. There are still a few cases of this but the internet has largely made this a thing of the past aided somewhat by piracy. A few of my friends had hacked translations of gen2 pokemon way ahead of the official releases, and one had "Pokemon Jade".
>>10886968Cheat devices like the Game Genie and Game Shark allowed you to play imported games.
>>10889364That's pretty neat
ok
