PS3 games region free?

[David]

PS3 games region free? by David

PS3 News: And more on the legality of mod chips.

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[Nick]

Hopefully they will, and hopefully other companies will follow suit.

Maybe this is because they couldn't be assed going to court anymore/don't want to shell out unnecessary revenue on something that can be avioded.

[Xamerkapsy]

Michael also fiercely defended region encoding at the Gameplay discussion event - he hijacked the question time for around thirty minutes to try and convince everyone that region encoding stopped piracy.

He made it clear then that the PS3 would be region encoded and that he "could not wait" until the FTA laws between the US and Australia were aligned so that the recent court ruling would be made redundant.

His stance last week was clearly pro-region encoding for the entire Playstation range aside from the PSP, purely because of the television screens required to play them on.

Very odd that he should turn around to say this only a week later.

Also, thought I should add that Michael's reasoning for seperate regions between Japan and America was because of the differences between NSTC-a and NTSC-b

[ObsoletE]

i think he's deluded if he thinks region coding reduces piracy, surely it enhances it. i suppose it just goes to show how little power he actually has, if he rants like this only to have the parent company basically force him into an amusing, and probably painful, backflip.

i think that by abolishing the region coding would be the first step to making mod-chips illegal again, since there would no longer be a legitimate reason to have the console modded. especially if they include some form of copy-protection on the hardware, like an additional data track to verify legitimacy of the software.

it's a given that someone will crack the copy-protection, but at least when this happens, there is no legal or semi-legal way to modify your console to play them. although i suppose the argument could be made that you mod your console to play non-region 4 DVDs (or whatever format we're watching next).

i suppose everyone here probably already knew all this.
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[realitybites]

I agree with that assessment.

The big problem large organisations like Sony face is grey marketing. As well its even bigger problem if the organisations make each region run on a P&L (Profit and Loss statement).

Thats what peeved Sony about the PSP in the UK with importers. Customers be damned we want to have a P&L for the region.

So whilst I'm picking on Sony here this could equally apply to many multinational organisations.

I hope for everyone's sake they (they being MS, Sony and Nintendo) drop regional encoding its been years since a TV/DVDs couldn't do NTSC and PAL.

[EvilHayama]

Do they seriously say that region coding is due to video issues? There are plenty of ways of dealing with that other than banning anyone from importing. I'm not sure why he says that the situation is different with HDTV, I thought our HD standard was different to the US one anyway.
I'm all for dropping it however, I now import almost all my games, which means I need multiple consoles (cheaper than a mod chip at the time)
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[Matt3]

it would be nice if they drop the coding. my mate went to china and got some ps2 games only to find out that his ps2 wouldn't run them because of this stupid coding. and i didn't even know that chips are legal. i thought they have always been illegal

[Quin]

[ZNMS]

Now while it seems this PlayStation 3 announcement may have been directly related to Sony's loss of legal control of their protection methods.

It has to be that, if not, then why on earth would Sony do such a thing? Why simply change?
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[Cro]

I guess this is good for importers, and I would think has to stop piracy nuts and hopefully drop game prices in Australia.
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