Motivations behind region restrictions in games

by kapowaz, Tuesday, March 26, 2013, 09:07 (4269 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Those aren't good reasons to region lock. The proper thing to do is what Blizzard USED to do, and that's let you connect to whatever region you want.

Maybe that's acceptable to a company with a half-assed focus on good user experience, but Blizzard just isn't that company any more. With games of this scale, letting users choose their region will result in a sub-optimal experience for a percentage. The exact amount will vary by game, but obviously in their case Blizzard decided that the trade-off (not giving users the option) was worth it. I'd have to imagine that the number of players desperate to team up with gamers on the other side of the world despite language and latency issues is massively outweighed by the number who'd try it out, only to find if didn't work very well and consequently blame Blizzard. I'm a firm believer that you don't outsource decisions like this to users in consumer products (the majority of gamers are *not* experts); that kind of mentality is precisely why Linux is still not a consumer product.