PlayStation 3 owners are now well used to the fact that the North American PlayStation Store gets all the best stuff, and gets it a long time before the rest of us. That’s fair enough – SCEA is justifiably keen to make sure its market, where competition with the rival Xbox 360 is at its fiercest, gets its hands on the goods as fast as humanly possible. The rest of us have to sit tight while regionalisation process is worked through.

The slightly sketchy workaround is to sign up for a foreign PlayStation Network account. Simple. It’s a kind of legal / licensing grey area, but it is the only way to get at the snazzy content available outside your own region. But if you’re eager to get your mitts on the Uncharted demo (understandably so!), well, unfortunately you’re out of luck because the version currently available in the US store won’t work on Japanese or European PlayStations.

Reassuring users that there is no big conspiracy, Naughty Dog’s line producer, Sam Thompson, braved the PlayStation.blog backlash to inform European and Japanese players that it was simply a bug in the demo code that prevents it from working outside the US, and not some conspiracy to introduce region locking to game demos.

It should extremely interesting to see what Sony does next though. As the demo appears to work perfectly in its intended region, then there’s no need to update the demo code. However, the amount of outcry might prompt it to fix the problem, thereby acknowledging – and effectively endorsing – the use of shady foreign PSN accounts to access other region’s content. Which would beg the question why we don’t just have an import section on the Store already?

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