Wii U will not play DVDs or Blu-ray, Iwata says

Planning to replace that aging Blu-ray player with a Wii U ? Not so fast. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata says the gaming console won’t play DVD or Blu-ray discs, due to patent licensing fees. Wii U does not have DVD or Blu-ray playback capabilities. 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 to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies. So there you have it. Iwata doesn’t want to hand over a bag of cash for baby Blu’s ” bag of hurt .” By the time the Wii U hits store shelves in 2012, we may be buying Blu-ray players just for their Netflix capabilities , so here’s to hoping the console at least carries over that functionality from its predecessor. Wii U will not play DVDs or Blu-ray, Iwata says originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on June 15, 2011. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.