Posted December 18, 2010
I buy games, new and used, online via third party merchants from Amazon and eBay. The problem I'm about to describe to you doesn't happen so often on eBay, because merchants worth their NaCl take photos of the products in question and post it on the page.
Anyway, about 50% of the PC games I've ordered from Amazon via third party merchants are not natively USA region games. That is to say, they're the EU version, and I can tell because they have the PEGI rating label on them instead of the North American ESRB rating label. It's not a problem as far as actually getting the game to run. The problem lies in the fact that the EU (and it's client countries) and the USA have different censoring laws, so some content in the European version of an American game may be cut.
Another problem is that some expansion packs aren't interchangeable with different region games. A prime example is the expansion for Sacred 2. Many an American player was disappointed when he or she received his or her imported copy of Ice and Blood, only to find that they had to have installed the European version of Sacred 2 to get it to work.
Needless to say, it's doubly important to label the region of DVD movies. I have multiple DVD players for multiple regions for that very reason.
In short, if you have aspirations of opening up your own video game/comic book/tabletop RPG shop, and you're going to sell online, be sure to properly label the region in which your products were published. And calling a product an "import" just because it's stamped with "Made in China" is cheating.
Anyway, about 50% of the PC games I've ordered from Amazon via third party merchants are not natively USA region games. That is to say, they're the EU version, and I can tell because they have the PEGI rating label on them instead of the North American ESRB rating label. It's not a problem as far as actually getting the game to run. The problem lies in the fact that the EU (and it's client countries) and the USA have different censoring laws, so some content in the European version of an American game may be cut.
Another problem is that some expansion packs aren't interchangeable with different region games. A prime example is the expansion for Sacred 2. Many an American player was disappointed when he or she received his or her imported copy of Ice and Blood, only to find that they had to have installed the European version of Sacred 2 to get it to work.
Needless to say, it's doubly important to label the region of DVD movies. I have multiple DVD players for multiple regions for that very reason.
In short, if you have aspirations of opening up your own video game/comic book/tabletop RPG shop, and you're going to sell online, be sure to properly label the region in which your products were published. And calling a product an "import" just because it's stamped with "Made in China" is cheating.
