Gaming Nintendo banning imports in the UK!

[Sephiroth]

For any UK'ers who didn't read Games Central on Teletext yesterday, Nintendo for some strange reason have decided to ban GC imports in the UK

When this will take effect I'm not sure, but my only guess for why they are doing this is the FreeLoader

People are most likely buying import games and playing them using the FL because they are tired of waiting for the PAL release for so long, and so when the PAL release is eventually sold, less copies are sold

What do you guys think about this whole situation?

[AzureWolf]

Two things:

First, I never agreed with the idea of importing video games that were coming out domestically in the first place. Keep the domestic game economy strong so it would survive, and, hopefully, bring more and more games to you in the future. Importing hurts the sales of a game, and therefore gives less incentive for companies to translate and care about whatever gaming community there is in your area.

Second, the UK is a different story. What the hell are they doing there?! I don't live in the UK, but I've read enough to know that things are getting out of hand. Of course you should import with their "give these dogs scraps" policy. I'm surprised that the gaming community there has tolerated this treatment at all. UK is no different, and there's an equally great market there as anywhere else. Well, at least I think so. I haven't heard anything to the contrary.

EDIT: You know, I was just thinking: what if importing is responsible for video game companies' lack of activity in the UK?

[Solo Tremaine]

That's relatively annoying, I must say- I agree with AzureWolf about the fairly poor gaming treatment we're given in this country- it's not fair when you see how much else to do with games you see in the US and Japan. Grante, we're a smaller market, but that shouldn't mean we're any less of gaming fans or whatever

I have a Freeloader, but I use it to play UK games on my US console, because I (surprise surprise) imported a GameCube for being fed up of waiting for the Uk release, which at the time was due several months later.

The UK is very much a PlayStation country, in this way- GameCubes are kind of looked down upon certainly by many people I know, and I think it's just because Nintendo have almost failed to try to bother and get a grip on the market here.

Having said that, I think it'll be useful to the market for the PAL sales to increase and will give more incentive for Nintendo to actually release games rather then let them suddenly appear on the shelves after six months.

Although it does annoy me- I was hoping to import Digimon Rumble Arena 2 and Starfox, simply to save me time having to put the Freeloader in every time I wanted to play. I hope they won't put an anti-FreeLoader thing on the PAL games, else I'll be very stuck- my US gamecube wouldn't play my UK games and I'd have to get a UK gamecube which may not be able to play US games o_o; Damn them.

[Semjaza]

Is this even fact again yet? This always pops up randomly every several months and nothing comes of it.

All of the major gaming companies would love to ban imports, as it really doesn't help their market share or public awareness at all. Plus, it generally forces people to mod their system in some way, although I've heard you guys have lots of NTSC compatible TVs now. Sony has tried to get in on this before as well, from what I remember. MS has done similiar things in Australia, but they seemed rather low key.

Honestly, I can't imagine that many people are importing that it would really affect these companies that badly. It's their fault that it takes literally months for Europe to get games after the US in general (which some exceptions)... and I understand that a lot of PAL conversions are awful.

So until these companies get off their asses and have their European divisions do something about this, they have few people to blame but themselves... That and the PAL standard, since neither the US or Japan use it.

However, you have to take into consideration that UK isn't the only place in Europe... and any Euro import I've played has had several different language selections in it, or is available in other languages. These things take time, and that's another big reason.

Personally, I think if you have the money, you should be allowed to do what you want with it.