Wii not even remotely region-free

This is a joke, I was really looking for region free, would of saved importers a lot of troubles. Best thing we can all hope for is that there will be a freeloader or even a chip as soon as possible, I really don't like the idea of buying 2 consoles. If you can see past this problem then nothing has really changed, just the amount of money we will end up spending :'(

the fact that it is not region free is seriously making me doubt whether to purchase this console in the first place.

1. I don’t understand the motivation to region-lock stuff. How does that create more revenue for the companies ?

2. If there is a financial advantage to region-locking, I just can’t imagine that Sony isn’t leading the pack. Their underhanded rootkit installation and then all their lies in the ensuing confusion are still very fresh in my mind. (I wouldn’t trust Sony with a peanut butter sandwich).

considering I don't import, I don't care.

Oh, and last I checked, in response to a very early comment, portables have never been region locked. The idea is that you can travel with it, and you should be able to play games that you purchase anywhere. If I fly with my US DS to the UK, I should be able to buy a game there and still play it. It's a pretty transparent explanation, but that's the idea.

Someone already touched on the movie/game encoding thing.

As for Sony and their region free claim, I buy it. What I DO expect, is some form of DRM. If I had to choose between poor DRM, and region encoding, I'll take region encoding.

So what, if the Wii is not Region-Free. Hopefully someday a third party developer will make a Freeloader software for the Wii to play import games just like they did with the gamecube. Playing Naruto Gekitou Ninja Taisen 4 on the gamecube is intensively awesome!! Can't hardly wait for the Wii version of the Naruto fighting game. That game will be sick!! Say word!

Region coding is one of the things that drives me up the wall. My wife is Japanese, I'm American/British and we live in Germany.

If I buy a EU Wii then my wife can't play any JP games (and a lot of the "brain teaser/weird games that women like are mainly JP only) and I can't play any US sports games (Baseball, etc.) which are generally not released in EU.

With DVDs its even worse and I have to resort to illegal dowloading instead of actually buying DVDs to see content that we want. This leads to me not buying DVDs either when I'm in JP or the US (for fear they won't work) or in Germany (for fear they won't work when we move). I can of course by a region-free player but these are generally pretty cheap quality (I've had two break on me).

Anyway, my point is that more and more people are living in other countries these days and while the attraction of region-free is mostly "that would be a nice hypothetical option for me to have" for people who live where they're from, there are those of us for whom this is a vital issue.