Finally. After nearly a year of Nintendo of America telling US Wii owners that Xenoblade will not be coming, it has finally relented and will bring it to the US in April 2012. This a huge deal. For nearly a year, a grassroots effort by the name of Operation Rainfall has been mobilizing US Wii owners to petition Nintendo to get that game and several other games brought to the US. Recently, they even hijacked a twitter discussion with Reggie Fils-Aime for this purpose.
What makes this a huge deal is that it shows just how effective a group of dedicated fans can have on companies to bring them what they want. If it weren’t for these fans, this game would never have been released in the US.
What is not too surprising is that this is being done at a time when Nintendo is migrating internal resources from Wii development to the WiiU. The next year will see very few new hit games released so it is no wonder that Nintendo has decided that it might as well release this game. Hopefully, Nintendo will also follow suit and bring other Operation Rainfall games to the US.
Overall, this whole ordeal shows one of the major problems with video game consoles, that of region restrictions. For some reason Nintendo insists on maintaining region restrictions on their consoles. It has not realized that we live in a globally connected world. People are aware of games that are released in other regions and they want to play them where they live as well. If the restrictions were not in place, fans could just buy them from where ever. But that is not the case.
Perhaps Nintendo will learn from this and remove region restrictions from the WiiU so that fans of games can buy them and play them regardless of where they live.
