Illogical Restrictions

Most of the people who read this blog are geeks, and will probably immediately know what I mean with this post. The subject in mind is restrictions that are imposed with little or no logical reasoning behind it. More specifically, I'm thinking about product release dates and region locking. This is particularily prominent when it comes to video games and movies.

We live in an age where digital distribution is taking over, and many of the bigger corporations have no idea how to deal with it. When it comes to both video games and movies, region locking has become standard as a way of fighting piracy. However, this only battles physical piracy (not the kind with pirate ships, mind you. I mean sales of physical copies of movies and the likes), and poorly at that. Practically every DVD player can be "region unlocked", and while I worked in a hi-fi store I noticed that the possibility to unlock the players were a major factor for sales. When Blu-Ray players came along, they could still be unlocked for the DVD part, but not for the Blu-Ray part. I seem to recall there being one particular player that could be unlocked for Blu-Ray movies as well, and it sold so much better because of that.

Now let's have a look at video games. Some of my favourite game series are developed in Japan. Back in the 1990's, there were games they didn't bother releasing outside Japan at all, although I don't know why. Maybe they didn't think the games would catch on. Anyways, when the games became more international, there was naturally quite a delay between the Japanese release dates and the ones in the US and Europe. The games had to be translated and localized, after all. And since certain European countries aren't content with games in English (I think Germany and France were the two major ones, but I always ignored the non-English selections on language selection screens so I can't remember), European releases were usually last.
This is a logical explanation for different release dates. But what about the western developers?

The point I'm trying to get to is that most of this distribution is digital today. Information flows more freely than ever, thanks to how widespread the usage of the internet has become. Sure there are sales of physical copies as well, but the distribution there is so streamlined that gamers have their copies in their hands by the time those who bought the digital copy are allowed to start playing or downloading.
Still they impose different release dates for the different parts of the world. I'll take Deus Ex: Human Revolution as a recent example, because that one bugged me. I bought the game from Steam a couple of weeks ago, and downloaded ("pre-loaded" it, as it's called) it to be ready for the release. I was still restricted to wait until the European release date to play it. When the americans got to play it on Tuesday, Europeans had to wait until Friday. No other reason than that there were different release dates. Proving this point, a friend of mine told me it was possible to connect to Steam through a proxy, so that Steam sees your IP address as coming from the US, and you'd be able to play the game. The same installation, same files. What could possibly be a good reason for this?
I know this issue can be attributed to impatience on my part, but the idea of it all truly bothers me.

And what about the region locking? There are certain movies that have never been released in a European format, such as the Invader Zim series and Metalocalypse. Oh, Europeans want to watch it? Tough luck.

This post is a "fuck you" to those responsible for keeping up the practice of locking content to regions. It's all I can do, vent my opinions to the internet and then forget about it afterwards. The dinosaurs will die, given time. I just wish the time would come sooner.