On the Internet - what the ____ is a Grey Market?

Most console games are already region-locked. MW2 is certainly not the first PC game; a lot of the DRM technologies available for PC games offer region locking through GeoIP.

I personally don't like region locking because it isn't something that we're used to as PC gamers and these kind of limitations are not well publicized. I've seen some cases where soldiers serving overseas couldn't play games that were sent by their families. It's pretty hard to tell those guys they aren't allowed to play when you know they're serving their country at huge risks.

All products have different prices (food, cars, toys) around the world but if you buy it from another country, you have to legally pay duty fees and shipping fees which will often make it slightly less appealing. With activation keys though, it's another ballgame because it's intangible. You can 'cheat' the system, not pay taxes and purchase a legitimate key that was meant for another market.

If the publishers don't use some form of region-locking (or make the products more 'physical'), then they have a few limited options:

a) Drop the foreign markets
b) Use fixed Western pricing
c) Lower pricing to be on par to the foreign markets

Option C is unlikely in the foreseable future. A and B are possible, but piracy will become the only viable solution for those players.

I'm not judging though, everybody wants a good deal -- and especially me! But I have a little grudge against the grey sellers who take the activation keys, literally throw the games in the garbage and set-up a web front to resell them at higher prices than what they paid for. I guess it's called having an entrepreneurial sense.

They're essentially removing legitimate low-cost copies from those markets and reselling them at higher prices to Western countries. And the potential players from those countries without affordable legal copies available have to fallback to piracy, again.