First, let me emphasis that I am 100% against region locking and dream of the day that Nintendo hardware can run games from any region.
I read Iwata response regarding the issue and I can't help but understand his point of view and arguments.
Nintendo operates in many countries around the world, mainly in Japan, North America and Europe. NA and European business is done by fully owned subsidies. Looking deeper into Europe, not all operators are owned by Nintendo. Sure France, UK, Germany and other big markets are directly operated by Nintendo, but what about other countries? Turkey, Scandinavian countries and some others are operated by "partners" and "official licenced" partnerd. Same thing for South Africa and probably other latin american countries. There may be other countries I am forgeting but you get my point
From what I understand, Nintendo is trying to protect these partners by having in place tools & mechanisms that allow them to "protect" partner's business.
What I want to ask is, do you honestly believe that Nintendo under it's current structure and how it operates, can afford to anger their representatives and partners?
Please feel free to correct any wrong information (I did not do a lot of research...).
His arguments are very solid... Until you stop viewing their systems in vacuum. The other video game systems are all region free, and have more support than Nintendo's consoles. In fact, their most successful family of all time (The DS family) was Region free for the majority of its lifespan. Therefore what he needs to address are the following matters:
1) Why these legislations are unique to Nintendo.
2) Why modern times allegedly disallow Region free policies when they were fine in the past.
These matters were neglected completely by Mr. Iwata's arguments. Wait, no that's not correct. He did in fact talk about the first point, but he asserted that this problem
wasn't exclusive to Nintendo when, in fact, it is.
So no, I for one am unsatisfied with his reasoning. I'm pretty sure he has more convincing pieces that could change our minds. But as long as he remains silent about them, I won't change my position. Pointing to "parental control" is an almost insulting excuse, but at least it confirms that this whole ordeal is tied to the software, not hardware (if it was tied to hardware then they could have just said so and we'd have nothing to go against, it's done, they can't go back).