For those of you who are “giddy” enough to import the Nintendo DSi early might want to hold off. Nintendo has announced that the DSi will in fact make the DSWare software region locked.

DSi is region locked because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself, and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region.

While this isn’t any surprise considering that the Virtual Console software is region locked, it does make that “import tax” seem a little unnecessarily high. There might be some of you who may want to import strictly for the media capabilities, I have reason to believe that most of us want this console for its future downloads. Metroid II, I’m looking at you!

Gamasutra