The May 21 unveiling of Microsoft's new gaming consol, The Xbox One, has forced side-by-side comparisons of the new Xbox platform and Sony's new Playstation 4 product. Adding to that debate, a company spokesperson has confirmed that the Xbox One will be region locked unlike its competitor, Playstation.
This is not a big deviation from Xbox's current platform as the Xbox 360 is also subject to region locking restrictions, however, in the great debate between which is the superior consol, the Xbox One or the PS4, region locking could become a big factor.
Region locking is something that video game developers have to deal with because content for games that are sold internationally can be restricted for moral or political reasons. Without region locking, someone in a country with such restrictions could just purchase a game online from a foreign country and have access to the content that way. For example, Australia has high content restrictions called "classifications." If a game is banned there, someone could simply try and find it in the U.K. or America where there are no such restrictions.
"Similar to the movie and music industry, games must meet country-specific regulatory guidelines before they are cleared for sale," A rep from Microsoft confirmed to Digital Trends. "We will continue to work with our partners to follow these guidelines with Xbox One."
Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles have had this divide for years as the PS3 platform has almost no region locking restrictions. Xbox on the other hand has seemed keen on avoiding the bevy of legal issues that arise when a gamer is shipping games across international boarders and finding a loophole in his or her country's censorship laws.
Popular gaming news site IGN.com has built a graph that allows users to view the two platforms, as well as Nintendo's Wii U, in a side-by-side comparison of many different factors that can be found here.
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