Introduction
Nintendo has been a big player on the console gaming market, however, in the last 2-3 years the company seemed to disappear. In the 2000s, the Nintendo DS was one of the best consoles in the world (in my opinion at least), however, now with their newest console, the Nintendo Wii-U, they are the ones that everyone’s laughing at. However, the company has a new product in line that they want to launch in 2016. This console is the Nintendo NX, a mysterious product that Nintendo has been working on.
The Nintendo NX
Nintendo has revealed some information about their newest on-work console, however, there aren’t many changes so far, or the details the company has provided about the console are quite a few. Nintendo has revealed that their new console will abolish the region lock in the gaming community (the Nintendo one, of course). This is the only news that the company has provided and worth telling you. The other news, such as the look of the device and the specs hasn’t been fully revealed. The look seems to stay the same as the previous consoles.
Region Locks in Gaming
If you want to buy a game from any point of the world, you will notice that there are region locks present on the market. But what are these region locks exactly and how are they influencing our gaming experience? Region lock is a type of lock or restriction that has been set to a specific region (mostly continents) or country. Why is this needed? This is needed, because of two things. The first one is that there are regions in the world that are poor and there are regions that are rich. If you a set the price the price of a game you need to set it as high as you can, however, you want to sell it right? So, if you want to sell it you need to lower the price tag if you see that people can’t afford it. In the instance of gaming, purchasing a game from Brazil will cost significantly less than buying a game in Switzerland. That’s because of the economical differences between Brazil and Switzerland. Most people in Switzerland bring more money to home than in Brazil and the GDP/person ratio is much better there. So, region locks are present on several gaming platforms in order to avoid businesses and users to purchase games from other regions where games cost much less than in their own region. So, the company is putting a region lock on the game, so they think that this will prevent people to do so. However, people are pretty smart, especially gamers, so there are groups of people all around the world that are developing or developed already options and workarounds to region locks.
The other thing that companies are setting region locks for games is because of the gamer communities. Every country has different types of gaming communities and big companies, such as Steam, want to separate them from each other. Don’t want to hurt somebody, but there are Eastern-European countries that are often insulting other members of other regions and are separated from the other parts of the world. There have been such protests on the internet about this by members of gaming communities that big companies were forced to do so.
Thirdly, the region lock issue is on because of the problem of latency. Yes, latency, or as most of the people know: pings, can cause several issues in multiplayer games. Just imagine if someone from South America would join to an Eastern European server with a ping of 200+ what lagging would it cause. I don’t even want to imagine it. Lag is one of the worst things that could happen to a server while online gaming, especially in competitive games, where you need to concentrate so much on playing as good as you can that a lag can make your gaming experience horrible. That’s why companies have set region locks, or at least this is a reason for it. Region locks decrease the freedom of gaming, however if we just see this reason, it is a very logical thing to do.
