Does anyone know what 'Not for sale in the US' means on a DS game mean?

[Miilover12345]

In 2022, i got an American copy of Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force and when i looked at the back of it it said 'Not for sale in the US' and that confused me as everything related to the DS game i owned said it was made in the US, it was rated by the ESRB, its box was the American one, and the cartridge itself said it was from the US, after i found out about this i was trying to find why it has this on there on the internet but i found nothing.
Does anyone have an answer for this?

 

[skawo]

Could mean it was bundled with something and as such shouldn't be sold separately.

 

[Pk11]

It was likely a collector's edition/bundle of some sort, perhaps:

Edit: lol

 

[FAST6191]

You sometimes see it on Japanese games, though more likely as "not for sale outside Japan". You can even meet it on the second hand/used game market where some collectors get very uptight about things leaving Japan, even more so if it is undumped, which is bizarre to me but hey.

For US stuff I have seen it occasionally on books. Usually university level ones for Europe or India where things are sane prices (or very cheap in the case of India) so people don't shortcut the very lucrative US college/university textbook scam/ripoff that goes down there.

Enforcement of such things is... not a thing really unless you have signed an agreement as a distributor -- WTO (world trade organisation) tends to frown upon restrictions here.

Specifics of this one could vary. It might have been a cheapy one for South America but done out of the US arm, and sometimes Australia would also get ERSB/NA versions of handheld games (consoles are PAL but handhelds not always). The ponderings above about it including some kind of offer (DLC by any other name) that was bought and paid for by the non American division (see also trying to get service on an imported console) and messing up (Disney's financial) accounts that way has been seen on a few things, whether it would extend to codes not working between regions like we sometimes see for game codes remains to be seen.

More likely though is you are going to have to go find someone invested in the deep lore of club penguin (for those playing along that maybe were not around it was actually quite a popular kiddy social media website type service/massively multiplayer online game) and see if they know more.