At the moment both the Nintendo Wii U and the 3DS are both region locked, although last year Nintendo did state that they would be looking into removing the region lock in the future. However it turns out that will not be happening, at least not for current-gen consoles. This was revealed by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata during an investor Q&A session.According to Iwata, it seems the removing the region lock on current consoles could prove to be problematic which is why it seems unlikely the current-gen consoles like the Wii U or 3DS will have the feature removed. However Iwata states that they are looking into it and that a region free Nintendo NX could be in the cards.
Iwata was quoted as saying, “Removing region-locking from current game machines presents various issues, so we don’t consider that to be very realistic. However, regarding NX, given the customer feedback and proposals from the market, while nothing has been decided yet, we’re currently investigating internally what problems there would be in realizing it.”
For those unfamiliar, the Nintendo NX is the company’s next-gen console and was announced earlier this year. Details on the console remain slim at this point in time but the company has promised that more information about it will be made available next year, but in the meantime we suppose a region free console could be one of its features.
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