Many of the gamers that identify with the “niche” field of gaming would agree that one of Nintendo’s shortcomings, maybe its biggest, is the fact that they continue to region-lock consoles. There’s nothing that kills a gamer like me, who imports games that see no love over here, quicker than a region-locked console. However, Nintendo may finally be loosening its iron grip on those locks.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s company president was asked at an investor meeting about plans regarding region-locks. The answer (with the translation coming from NeoGAF)

“The game business has a history of taking a very long time with localization among other things, such as having to deal with various issues of marketing in each particular country, or games that have made use of licensed content that did not apply globally, and had all kinds of circumstances, so to say, that region-locking has existed due to circumstances on the sellers’ side rather than for the sake of the customers. In the history of game consoles, that is the current situation … As for what should be done going forward, if unlocked for the benefit of the customers, there may also be a benefit for us. Conversely, unlocking would require various problems to be solved, so while I can’t say today whether or not we intend to unlock, we realize that it is one thing that we must consider looking to the future.”

So, while that is hardly indicative of a change coming soon, at least we importers know that the possibility does indeed exist. It’ll be nice to have access to games like the trio that Operation Rainfall fought for without the need for such drastic measures.