Releasing worldwide doesn't make money.

According to Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada, it's incredibly difficult to make a game that appeals to all three major territories, and so it is necessary to create games for the specific territories in order to maximise profit potental, and not waste money releasing a game that won't be as succesfull in another territory.

Article here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24023

Now, that's all well and good for a company interested in profit. But as a consumer interested in games, hows about you take off the regional restrictions so I can import the games you decide not to release here? It's all well and good chasing after the money like every other business on the planet, but some of us don't like being jerked around and just want to play awesome games without dancing around buying 3 different fucking consoles and power converters/etc. Not to mention Sonys ban on import of it's licensed products to Europe. Anti-consumer madness.

So yeah, expect less niche games to be released state/europe-side. from Square Enix from now on. Not that they did a whole lot of that anyway. I think this article mostly implies they won't be releasing tomb raider etc in Japan, and might keep some of the more traditional Japanese Square Enix games solely for Japan. Either way, i'm sure somebody somewhere is going to miss out, and that's a bad thing.

Agreement.

Sony might have removed the region lock from their consoles, but it's actually harder to get import Sony products in Europe now.

After the amount of people importing Sony Playstation 3 consoles after the US and JP releases (Europe had to wait 6 months remember) tons of people were importing, now, Sony didn't want this to negatively impact the Europe release, so they outright banned all importing of their products and threatened anyone who offered import products with legal action. So sites like PlayAsia now will NOT ship ANY officially licenses Sony products to Europe, which means no PS2 games (up until the system went open and products didn't need to be licensed, the products that were licensed still cannot be imported) no PSP games and no PS3 games.

You can get them at a hugely inflated price on eBay though. 

Jup. Region locks and IP banning are my bane.

What is the major reason they could be holding on to region restriction?  Could it be less of a problem worrying about international copyright laws?  Wouldn't private ownership sort of circumvent that, or is international sales of works outside of their protected area considered a sort of gray market?

I know restrictions ha've actually been lifted in some games, which means that they get an increase in sales without worrying about it appealing to general regional audiences.  It seems like a win-win to me, especially if the game-makers remove self-imposed export barriers.

I agree but the company should make it easier for people out of that targeted country to aquire the game without importing, maybe put a small amount in other countries because there is a small amount of people in other countries who wants to buy these games and they are not interested in importing.