Aaron Davies is on a crusade. As a loyal Nintendo Wii fan, he is sick an tired of the Australian, New Zealand and and Pacific regions (ie “PAL” format) getting consistently screwed with slow release dates for first-party Nintendo games. Aaron’s report covering release dates of the top 8 rated games (pdf) clearly shows that when it comes the third party releases, the lag time between the English language release in North America and Australia is much shorter than games produced ‘in house’ by Nintendo. Nintendo ‘in house’ titles tend to be released several months later in Australia, while third party titles are usually available in Australia less than a month after the US release.

Part of Aaron’s report also covers the PAL vs. NTSC televison format issue that Nintendo always uses to justify having multiple “regions”, and region locking of games. His conclusions highlight what I have always suspected … most people in Australia/NZ/Pacific regions have multi-format televisions these days, and region locking to prevent PAL “regions” using NTSC games is nothing more than a way to give Nintendo more control of the local market and ultimately make them more money, at the cost of the consumer. Region locking helps prevent consumers benefiting from cheaper parallel imports from other regions (ie, Australian Wii owners cannot benefit from a surplus of unsold copies of “Red Steel” made for the Asian or US market). Sure, modchips (which are legal in Australia) get around this problem, but Nintendo’s recent crackdown on modchips in recent firmware updates makes this an annoying cat-n-mouse game that most Wii owners don’t want to play.

Of course, if there was no region locking, those who have NTSC (or multi-format) televisons in Australia could buy the import version, while the very very few Wii owners who don’t have a multi-format TV can wait for the PAL version. Alas, Nintendo have shown time and time again that they are complete control freaks when it comes to this type of thing. The only way to convince the “big N” that region locking is evil is for Wii owners to refuse to buy the next Nintendo console if it is region locked … and no Nintendo fanboy is actually going to do that, they would prefer to buy the new console and get screwed by Nintendo for the privilege. (Anyone remember the early reports from within Nintendo that the Wii, then codenamed “Revolution”, was going to have region-free first-party releases … I do, it helped influence my decision to buy one. Later, this turned out to be false. I’m not sure if Nintendo backflipped on this, or if it was an inaccurate report, but either way it sucks to ultimately have the Wii region-locked.)

I really hope something comes of this, but I doubt it. Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands together are still only a small market compared with other regions, and past history shows that Nintendo’s primary objective is to make big $$$ for it’s shareholders … the customer comes second. Good luck Aaron, you’ll need it.

If you want to Digg this story, don’t submit my post to Digg, Digg this.