supply and demand

If I was in charge of marketing for the Xbox 360, I would have insisted that the Japanese and American Xboxes were in the same region, and could play each other's games interchangably.

First off, there isn't nearly as much piracy in Japan as there is elsewhere in the world, which is usually what region encoding is meant to stop. There's really no reason not to have the boxes be interchangable.

However, the SECOND reason would have avoided the massive PR failure that the Xbox has become in Japan. Imagine if everyone in Japan could have gone out and bought an Xbox and then sold it to an American on ebay. Suddenly, it would look like the console was massively popular worldwide, not just in America and Europe. There would be no boxes on the shelves anywhere in the world, because the demand would have been globalized.

Hell, it would have probably had a knock-on effect in Japan, because if the damn things are selling out and hard to get, Japanese people would probably want them more. Things in high demand are always more attractive.

Instead, you get a massive shortage here, and a surplus there. That benefits no one.

Dumb bastards should have hired me for consulting.