According to Games Industry, Sony will follow the
example of the Game Boy Advance and feature no region coding for its games,
according to SCEE boss David Reeves - who also confirmed that the system's RAM
has been upgraded.
"Probably [..] games will come out with no regional
coding," he stated in an interview on an official Sony website, which has
since been withdrawn. However, pressure from Hollywood means that movies
distributed on UMD discs for the device will still have to be region
locked.
Although Sony has enforced region locking on its consoles
in the past, the practice makes little sense on a handheld device, since
people are expected to carry their systems with them on trips abroad and
must therefore be able to purchase software outside their native country
or region.
"It will have 30MB of RAM, now, which it
didn't have before," he stated - and development sources have confirmed
that the final specification for the system does indeed sport 24MB of main
RAM, 4MB of video RAM and 2MB of general purpose media processor RAM. Full
development systems for the platform are expected to ship to developers in
the coming weeks, according to Reeves - replacing the PC-based emulators
currently in use for early game creation
work. |
Right, it doesn't make sense to region lock a
portable device used by people on vacations. So why is the movie industry unable
to grasp the concept? You can go here to read the rest of the interview at Games Industry.
Source: Games Industry
