Region locking

Region locking is the practice of restricting what a product will do according to where its owner lives. It covers discs that refuse to play outside the territory they were sold in, consoles that reject games bought abroad, services whose catalogue changes at the border, hardware shipped with functions enabled in one market and disabled in another, and finished software that is never offered in a given country at all.

The stated justification is usually licensing: rights are sold territory by territory, and staggered release dates and prices are defended as a consequence of that. The effect on the owner is the same whatever the reason. A product they have paid for behaves differently from an identical product sold elsewhere.

How it works

Region locking is enforced at whichever layer is hardest for the customer to reach.

On optical discs it is written into the media and the player firmware. DVD region coding, introduced in 1997, exists because "different entities have the rights to distribute different content in various regions", and the coding is what lets the industry "prevent, for example, cheap DVD imports from an Asian region flooding European or US markets", protecting whichever distributor paid for that territory. Blu-ray simplified the scheme to three regions, A, B and C, with players required to enforce it, so that a disc from the wrong region returns an error rather than a picture.

On consoles it has been enforced in the system software, and policy has varied by vendor and generation. Nintendo region locked its consoles through the Wii U and 3DS era, and abandoned it for the Switch, whose support documentation states that "With the exception of consoles and game cards distributed in the Chinese region, Nintendo Switch game cards are not region locked." Sony took the opposite position a generation earlier, stating of the PlayStation 4 that "In general, neither digital or disc-based games will be region locked", while noting that individual publishers could still lock their own titles.

In hardware it appears as functions present in the device and enabled only for certain markets. Apple has restricted millimetre-wave 5G to United States models since the iPhone 12, so that phones of the same name sold elsewhere carry a narrower set of bands. Where the restriction is geographic rather than commercial, this overlaps with Capability gating.

In services it appears as a catalogue that changes with the customer's location. Analysis of Netflix's libraries has found substantial differences between countries, with the United States catalogue about twenty per cent smaller than that of some European markets.

Withholding software that is already finished

A sharper version of the practice is the case where the work of serving a market has been completed and the market is then not served. The product exists, the translation exists, and the decision not to release is commercial rather than technical.

Two documented cases come from video games. Nintendo commissioned and completed an English localization of the Famicom role-playing game Mother. Its localization director, Phil Sandhop, states that "the final, approved build of EarthBound was complete by September of 1990". It was still being previewed to readers in Nintendo Power in May 1991, then shelved, and a later attempt was dropped because the cartridge would have been expensive to manufacture and the return on investment was not there. Square Enix had, by 2012, "shelved a near-complete localization that included an English script and voice recording work" for Final Fantasy Type-0, a decision the game's director later explained in terms of the market rather than the work: "The biggest reason really was the timing. After we released the Japanese version, and then it would go into localization, the US PSP market at the time was kinda shrinking."

The same pattern is documented outside games on the 2011 and 2012 Sony BRAVIA televisions, where the manufacturer's own application files show work finished for a market that was never offered it. The application catalogue served to European sets lists eight applications, the catalogue served to Brazilian sets lists two, and the application bundles on Sony's servers carry their names and dictionaries localized into thirty or more languages, Portuguese included. Those servers still answer today. The material cost of serving the market had already been paid, and the market was served a shorter list.

Why it is a problem

The owner cannot establish what they have bought from the product name. Two televisions, phones or consoles bearing the same model number may differ in what they will do, and nothing on the box explains which one the buyer is holding.

Restrictions outlive their justification. Release windows close, licences change hands, and the enforcement written into a disc or a player's firmware remains. A film whose staggered release ended fifteen years ago is still refused by a player from the wrong region.

The burden is not evenly distributed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued that these mechanisms fall hardest on poorer countries, stating that "Windowing and region coding are used to discriminate against poor countries by offering them information goods only after they have exhausted their commercial potential in rich countries", and giving as an example that "a Filipina who is working in the USA can't use a local DVD player to watch the movies her family sends her from home".

Regulatory response

The European Union addressed geographic discrimination directly in Regulation (EU) 2018/302. Its Article 3(1) provides that "A trader shall not, through the use of technological measures or otherwise, block or limit a customer's access to the trader's online interface for reasons related to the customer's nationality, place of residence or place of establishment."

The exemptions are as significant as the rule. Audiovisual services provided under exclusive territorial licences are excluded from its scope, as are services whose main feature is access to copyright protected works, which leaves streaming catalogues and most media licensing outside the regulation. Article 9 requires the Commission to review the regulation periodically, including whether such services should be brought within it.

Competition law has reached further in individual cases. In January 2021 the European Commission fined Valve and five games publishers a combined sum of about 7.8 million euro over geo-blocking that restricted cross-border sales of around a hundred PC games. The competition commissioner described the decision as "a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales".

See also

• Capability gating, where the deciding factor is payment or product tier rather than location
• Format abandonment
• Digital rights management
• Storefront shutdown