When regional lockout or regional coding was first introduced by Nintendo, the other companies eventually followed suit. After being implemented for a good number of years, the practice has revealed various negative implications, like unfair product price hikes and consumers resorting to software cracking and modding.

During this year's eGames, SCE Australia and NZ Managing Director Michael Ephraim has a few important things to say regarding the matter, hinting that it should be stopped. "Moving towards the high definition era, there will be one standard. There’s not going to be NTSC or PAL," answered Ephraim after being asked regarding the future of zoning. He added that, "with PlayStation Portable and Nintendo portable devices there have been no regions because you’re playing on a standard screen."

Actually, the PSP enforces a lockout though partially. It is true that Japanese games can be played on a U.S. unit but the same is not true for UMD movies. Given this, the Sony official lamented, "That’s the movie thing, but the games thing has more technical standards on television and I think we’ll see less and less of that as technology changes."

While this sounds rather good, consumers shouldn't be expecting it to happen in the near future. Towards the end of the interview, it became clearer that the view expressed by Ephraim is not shared by the rest of his company: "Even though those are words that are sure to make many importers very happy, we have to admit that it doesn’t seem to fit in with Sony’s strategy so far." Nintendo and Microsoft representatives did not comment about the matter.