Oh yes. The original reason it was incepted was to prevent market demand from wildly spiking and to protect copyrights and trademarks.
1) Supply & Demand: If you make 10,000 units to sell in Japan because you expect the demand is for that amount, you don't want the USA buying 4,000 units out of that stock. Now you can't tell if demand in Japan is higher than your initial estimation, or if the overseas demand is there. So when what? Make more for Japan? Invest in overseas? Either of them may result in a huge loss when you make more units and then fail to sell them. It muddies things to say the least.
2) Regional Investment: Not every company can pay for a world wide release. Consider that say you have 10k units in Japan, 100k units in the USA, and 60k units for Europe territories. If you can't afford to make that 190k unit stock, you need to do them in steps. By that I mean make and sell the 10k Japan copies, get your money from that and use it to pay for the USA 100k copies, etc, etc as you get through all of your regional supplies.
3) Copyrights & Trademarks. Usually you want to get your legal stuff set before you deploy in a region. Different countries have different rules and processes, that take different amounts of time to complete, for registering trademarks, patents, etc. You really want to be sure you're safe on those before going ahead and deploying in those regions. There is a LOT more detail in this, and is a little subjective and case by case, but that's the basic overview.
4) Contracts and Legal Stipulations: Contracts, either for development, distribution, assets, marketing, etc, can have weird conditions and be region specific or prevent out of region sales by any number of parties involved in the product. These are most always very situational and case by case. Not much I can detail about it.
5) ESRB / Ratings: The sale of products in a country not rated by the government of that country can come with heavy penalties and legal trouble. The process in which they are rated are very case by case, and depending on the content of the game can take a very long time. Usually it is hard to coordinate this, and other similar processes, for release of a game world wide at the same time. More to the point, retailers usually are required to have ratings on games which really is the big block on this. They will NOT sell games without a rating.