What is the purpose of region-locking video game systems? [closed]
I'll quote an answer on another forum from 2015 :
It's because of price discrimination. Steam, for example, used to have all its prices in USD, and no games were region locked. Then they switched to regional currencies for price discrimination reasons. A $60 game is way too high a price for a consumer in the Philippines, so the same game that costs $60 USD will usually be around $40 when converting from the Philippine price, and so it has a higher chance to get sold. Then people started figuring out that you could have people buy games from the "cheap" regions, then gift them to you via Steam's in-client trading feature. This started a whole fiasco of furious trading and basically everyone was buying the cheapest copy around, resulting in a net loss of money for Valve and the developers. So they banned cross-region trading, and made it so that most games could only be played if bought in your region--yep, region-locking. People started getting scammed too, which is the on-paper reason that region-locking was enforced, but the above is what the community generally agrees upon.
https://www.quora.com/Video-Games-Why-is-region-locking-still-a-thing