Well, you hoped for it, you dreamed, but it’s actually a reality.
Nintendo is releasing a region free console.
You read that right, Nintendo Switch will be region free.
This is awesome.
This obviously means everything to Australian owners who have regularly found themselves waiting for certain games to be released here in our territory.
I’m surprised. Blown away even. This is great news.
Comments
18 responses to “Nintendo Switch Won’t Be Region Locked”
Not bad, it only took ’em 35 pissing years!
DS was region free, so it only took ’em 12 years!
The DS was NOT region free. They have region locked every game boy since the original as they did with the consoles.
No no, look it up. You could put a card from any country in there and it would work. The DSi eshop was region locked but not the cards, on the DS phat and DS lite.
The DS is region free for cartridges. I own two AU DS units and imported the American pokemon games from that era.
Jesus,
This looks like the console that shows Nintendo is finally getting it.
I need to know more about the online stuff.
HDMI, Screenshotting, USB-C charging whilst playing, Touchscreen, NFC stuff, wireless-LAN, shoulder buttons, offset sticks, rumble, no region locking.
They qualified it with an “in general” statement… I wonder if there’s caveats to be had.
Might be publisher specific… or maybe they’re tying DLC to the region of purchase.
DLC has always been region specific on the online stores on Playstation and Xbox. As long as physical games can be played on any switch, I’m happy enough.
Yeah I bet that’s it. Region locking for online things, region free physical. How that affects DLC for physical things, we don’t know. Whether you can make multiple accounts in different regions, we also don’t know!
The big thing with Sony is that your account is linked to a specific region but your system can have accounts from multiple regions and they’ll each be able to use each other’s stuff, so if you for example import a game from Japan, and it has DLC, you can make a Japanese account and buy prepaid cards and then buy stuff off the JP PSN store. It’s the best way to implement it from a consumer perspective but not sure if Nintendo understands this stuff well enough to implement it similarly, or if they’ll just assume eg all accounts on an AU system are AU accounts (which is the way it worked on 360, not sure if XB1 went more Sony-like or not since it’s my secondary system and the MS exclusives tend to be western-developed and release AU and US at the same time anyway)
Not for much longer. Sony have announced they will be tying device location to psn accounts soon. Due to copyright laws etc. got an email a while back as I have a us account linked to an Aussie PS4. They advised me that this account will be unable to use the store etc on the device soon. (Word is it’s part of the update coming in February)
That’s interesting. I have accounts for US, AU and Japan which I use periodically, with the US one being my primary one as of 2012 when I decided to ditch AU as primary because of the Vita. I haven’t seen any emails like that, but I live in the USA.
My expectation is that it’ll work like Xbox 360. Region free unless the publisher locks it, and if you want DLC you’re shit outta luck because your system can only have one account region on it.
As long as I can use multiple accounts from different regions, I’m happy.
So it’s region free unless it’s not. What a great article. We as consumers have had how many “region free” consoles over the past years? I can’t think of one that actually is
The console itself is region free. However, it would be up to publishers whether they want to impose some kind of region lock on their games. This has been the case with the Xbox 360 and now the Xbox One, but honestly I really can’t think of a game that’s bothered to do it on either of those systems. I’d say it’s very unlikely we’ll see many, if any game actually region locked. As others have stated above if anything is region locked it’s probably gonna be DLC.