Nintendo Co Ltd has not said much about the in-development console that will replace the Wii U, other than revealing its codename, “NX.” While details on NX have been scarce so far, company president Satoru Iwata has suggested that the console may do away with region locking, allowing it to play any game regardless of its country of origin.

“Removing region-locking from current game machines presents various issues, so we don’t consider that to be very realistic,” Iwata said during a recent investor Q&A. “However, regarding NX, given the customer feedback and proposals from the market, while nothing has been decided yet, we’re currently investigating internally what problems there would be in realising it. You can think of that as the current situation. I understand your desire, so I’d like to look at it optimistically going forward.”

As a Japanese game company, Nintendo has released many games for its systems over the years that were only available in Japan and have never been localized for other countries. While there has always been a modest import market for Japanese games, region locking prevents consoles released in America or elsewhere from playing many of those games. In many cases, gamers who wanted to play the original Japanese titles had to modify their console to circumvent region locks or had to also own a Japanese console.

Making the NX console region-free would eliminate this requirement and make it easier for gamers to play imported games on the system.

But that does not mean that there will suddenly be a large influx of Japanese games. With the gaming industry shifting its focus from physical games to digital copies, Nintendo could still restrict access to foreign games by simply separating them within its digital storefront.

Valve Corp’s Steam Client already does this to prevent players in one country from buying games at the cheaper rates of another country. Many Australian Steam users, for example, use VPN clients to mask their country of origin, allowing them to buy games at significantly cheaper American prices.

Whether or not Nintendo will use a similar tactic remains to be seen, and full details about the NX console are not expected to be revealed until 2016.