Without going into great detail, Nintendo has stated that Wii U will use a proprietary disc format. No one was expecting it to use Blu-ray discs, and the expectation was that PlayStation 3 would continue to be the only game console capable of playing Blu-ray movies. Wii U won’t be changing that, and it’ll also be continuing the trend of Nintendo consoles not supporting DVD movies playback, too.
Nintendo has published the transcript from a Q&A session with investors that took place at E3 last week. When asked about the prospect of playing movies on DVD or Blu-ray, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata answered, “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.”
Since Nintendo moved away from cartridge-based formats in its home consoles with GameCube, we’ve wondered when a Nintendo system would be capable of playing DVDs — a feature that was included in the PlayStation 2 at launch in 2000. Panasonic released a GameCube/DVD player hybrid, known as the Q (pictured above), back in 2001. It ended up being discontinued and was never brought to regions outside of Japan. The Wii was originally planned to have DVD functionality before it was quietly removed and then promised to be coming a year after launch, in 2007. That never ended up happening, although modders found their own ways to make DVD playback possible on Wii.
