Nintendo indie spokesman tweets about region locking, gets canned

Dan Alderman, Nintendo’s indie outreach specialist, has announced that he will be leaving the company. Seems he’s not leaving on the best of terms either.

Alderman had been banned from Twitter by his employers last year for sympathizing with gamers over Nintendo’s region locking policy. The company has strict rules when it comes to corporate messaging, so naturally their partnership wasn’t going to last for much longer. In an interview with Kotaku, Alderman said “I had been strongly encouraged to stay off of Twitter-or at least say only things that were clearly safe-so after the region-locking comment they just said I needed to stop completely,” “When people started complaining that I wasn’t active on Twitter anymore, it was suggested that a PR person could just post in my name. I thought that was about the worst idea I’d ever heard, so I left it as is and let the silence speak for itself.”

It’s important to keep in mind that Nintendo of America is well within their rights to let go of employees who they feel have violated the rules. Not all is bad for Dan though. He is remaining in the industry as a consultant for indie developers.

Of course the bigger issue at play here is Nintendo’s steadfast support for region locked games. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it simply means that games intended for one market (ie Japan) use DRM to make sure they will not work in another. It has long been a annoyance for gamers. Especially considering some popular titles never get localized releases outside of their home country. If you can speak Japanese or read Kanji fluently, why shouldn’t you be able to import?

Initially, region locking was just a normal part of gaming due to technical differences between television systems. Though since the advent of a standardized and global HDTV format, that is is no longer the case. Most modern displays are compatible with both PAL and NTSC frame rates. Others have argued it’s a form of price control, since games are cheaper in some regions than others. Though shipping costs render that moot.

There really seems to be no logical reason why it still exists. In fact, Nintendo remains the last holdout.

Rivals Sony and Microsoft do not support region locking for game content on any of their current generation platforms. Sony in fact has left region locking optional for publishers since 2005. Only one PS3 game ever utilized it, so it was scrapped entirely. This makes Nintendo look a rather archaic. If publishers don’t use it and gamers don’t want it, what’s the point of enforcing it?

Sources: Twitter, Joystiq