Nintendo's next console seems likely to reverse the company's recent policy of mandatory region locking, which limits software to run only on hardware sold in the same geographic area.

In a recent Q&A with investors (translated by NeoGAF), company President Satoru Iwata said, while "nothing has been decided yet, we're currently investigating internally what problems there would be in realizing [a region free system]. You can think of that as the current situation. I understand your desire, so I'd like to look at it optimistically going forward."

Iwata's statement applies solely to Nintendo's next console, the still-nebulous "NX" that was officially announced in March. Removing the region locks that exist on the Wii U and 3DS, however, "presents various issues, so we don't consider that to be very realistic," he said.

While Nintendo defended its region locking practices as recently as late 2013, Iwata said last November that the company "must consider" whether a region lock was worth maintaining into the future. Today's statement is the strongest sign yet that Nintendo is leaning toward doing away with the mandatory region lock for its next console.

In considering the issue, Iwata said Nintendo has been listening to "customer feedback and proposals from the market." That's likely an oblique reference to an Internet campaign aimed at convincing the company to go region free, which now includes over 35,000 change.org signatures as well as plenty of Miiverse posts, Twitter messages, Facebook posts, and more.

Nintendo is the only hardware manufacturer that currently requires games on its systems to be locked to a specific region, though a few software makers do impose their own regional locks on certain titles. While other companies have been tilting away from the practice in recent years, Nintendo has been going in the opposite direction, adding region locking to the 3DS after decades of region-free handhelds, for instance.