Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has confirmed that Nidendo’s new console will not support DVD or Blu-Ray playback. However, Nintendo has designed a proprietary format to be used with the Wii U. This new format will have a maximum capacity of 25 Gb and the same physical dimensions as a Blu-Ray disk.

According to Iwata “the reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-Ray such that it didn’t warrant the cost involved building such functionality into the Wii U console because the patents related to those technologies.” This interesting and somewhat disappointing choice seems to stem from a desire to keep prices down, which is consistent with Nintendo’s history of trying to profit off the sales of the console itself. When the original Wii launched it was the only console that was profitable from selling by itself where both the Xbox 360 and PS3 were sold at a loss.

While it may be true that most people don’t need yet another DVD player, the lack of Blu-Ray support is disappointing especially at a time when Nintendo claims to be aiming at the “hard core” gaming audience.

Source Kotaku