6

I often come across questions of making games, or more commonly DLC, with some form DRM work in regions that they were not sold to. Most of the time it comes down to "no, it's region locked and we're not going to tell you how to illegally break the DRM." For example:

Not all "region" questions are bad. For example, these are questions about regions that are helpful:

So what should we do about the first set of questions that are so common? Flag as Too Localized?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

If presumably-illegal activities aren't allowed, Off Topic would seem to work best. Those questions don't seem so bad however. The SC2 question in particular doesn't seem to make an assumption of cracking or working around DRM, but is just asking if it's possible and how. I don't think we should assume evil intent, but instead make clear what is and isn't possible without providing possibly-illegal solutions (as the accepted answer to that question does well).

See also: Would it be appropriate to ask a question regarding how to legally backup your own games?

1

On the one hand, as far as DRM goes, arbitrary region locking is one of the more assholish maneuvers game publishers can pull. On the other, since it's their software it's by right their decision who to sell it to and under what license terms. As consumers our only legal input into the decision process is complaining on a forum or voting with our dollars and not buying the game.

... And on the third hand, sometimes a game is region locked because in certain regions it's not actually legal to sell (for instance, for a long time Australia had no legal rating code for the equivalent of 18+, so any game so rated was illegal there, and game publishers had to jump through crazy hoops to get said games onto the market -- and not all of them bothered).

TL;DR: Most people will probably agree that region restriction is a consumer-hostile method, but it's the publisher's call to use it. More to the point, circumventing the DRM to cross regions isn't too different from piracy (in most cases, if you can do one you can likely do the other) so we should err on the side of caution.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .