#region locking

[hileynoteson]

what if

the best chips ive ever had

but

the chips were

region locked :(

[friiday-thirteenth]

right okay question time for anyone who knows anything about dvds: how would I unlock the region on a dvd/dvd player? im locked to region 4 and i want to get dvds off of amazon, but before i do i need to make sure im not going to get fucked over by region locks lmao.

[fandomlife-confessions]

[firespirited]

What region locked content looks like:

Microsoft and Amazon check your credit card address (UK and French banks refused). Vudu is blocked at a server level to non USA addresses so tried a proxy and it refused after I’d created an account when checking my PayPal’s main address.

Youtube and Google play give you an error message after going through your PayPal.

When I stuck these messages in a search engine, apparently it happens to Canadians a lot too.

[maireadralph]

Disney+ UK: We have Owl House S2 now!

Me: Hurrah! I can FINALLY unblock the spoiler tags across socials and join in

Disney+ UK: just to S2E15…hope you didn’t want the other 6

Me: ARSE

[askagamedev]

Do any games have any sort of things that are intentionally to appeal to the Chinese or any Asian market? It seems that anything that's Hollywood based has a claim that says so for any sort of feature present or not present, like with the new Jurassic World game that came out?

Some games do. AAA games cost a tremendous amount of money to develop and market. Many AAA games live and die on the breadth of their target audience because selling to more people means earning more money. Asia represents a huge number of potential customers, but not all types of games do well in Asia - American Football, Halo, and Star Wars, for example, are not as popular there. If the game concept is something that the executives think will do well in Asia, of course they will ask the developers to build it (in part) with the Asian market in mind.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the game will focus on appealing to the Asian market at the exclusion of the western market. We want western players’ money too, after all. It just means that we try to hit a sweet spot that has some content that appeals to each major group in our overall target audience.  Remember, we still have to publish regional versions of the game for other reasons (language and such). If we have content in that fuzzy, fixable area between acceptable and unacceptable to a major audience demographic, we usually look to see if we can make it less unacceptable in some way. From an efficiency perspective, it is typically more cost-effective to minimize region-specific content and game systems so all players get as much of the game as they can. However, game direction isn’t all about efficiency and the values of the team leadership are also important in determining what gets made.

If certain core demanded or directorially-important content for one audience is flat-out unacceptable to a different audience (e.g. selling power in microtransactions or LGBT content), we usually need to design and build alternate versions of that content for the regions where it is legally unacceptable. For China in specific there’s a list of often-changing certification standards that we have to meet in order to launch there anyway. The CCP has many specific content and legal regulations that our game must comply with if we are to obtain permission there. That requires its own separate certification process and game version already, so it makes sense that we would keep certain things that Chinese gamers like but western gamers don’t exclusive to the China version of the game.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[dappercritter]

Youtube makes me want to kill myself and all I do on there (besides watching videos) is make playlists.

[sachikoq]

Yo real shit I've been wondering since day one of this and the "Poob has it for you" memes showing up on my dash again aren't helping... When Youtubers are doing their little ad for some scam VPN company and they mention "YOU GET TO TURN ON YOUR MAGIC VPN AND WATCH ANIME THEY DON'T HAVE ON AMERICAN NETFLIX!!1!!1!" have they like... bothered to check if any of those have subtitles? Like, I don't really use Netflix unless it's with my boyfriend, nor would I bother checking myself. Like dog their audience is probably full of English-onlies there's no fucking way they're gonna turn on a VPN and get any sort of region locked content they can't just get elsewhere.