Xbox One To Be Region Locked

A report on XbitLabs states that Microsoft has made the decision to region lock their new Xbox One console, although this doesn’t really come as a big surprise to me, nor does it present me personally with any issues, it could be bad news for those who love to import their games as you would then need either an “unlocked” or “cracked” consoles, or of course an imported console to play those imported games.

This isn’t a case of sticking it to customers though as most companies region lock different kinds of hardware to prevent the breaking of regional laws, a certain game might be illegal in one country and not in the other, this would prevent such software being imported and played where it is not meant to.

“Similar to the movie and music industry, games must meet country-specific regulatory guidelines before they are cleared for sale. We will continue to work with our partners to follow these guidelines with Xbox One,” said a Microsoft official in a conversation with Digital Trends web-site.

The other, much less technical solution, would be to not sell that game in that territory and let the people decide their own fate with the local law for importing games, a much more fair and just system if you ask me, plus the import business from sites like Play-Asia will no doubt take a profit hit from this lock, especially given the amount of games that may never get released globally.

There is also some issue with taxes, import prices being cheaper / higher and other such things, but this has always been true of import goods and its hard to say just yet how that will work with the Xbox One given that no official prices have been released yet.