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Nintendo Says Wii U Won't Play DVD Or Blu-ray Movies
Nintendo's recently announced Wii U looked as though it held the capability of being a multimedia powerhouse, with Nintendo's on-stage E3 presentation showing the device displaying videos and photos on a television and the unit's built-in LCD screen. According to company president Satoru Iwata, however, the Wii U won't necessarily be replacing other devices in your AV cabinet.
In a Q&A with investors, Iwata confirmed that the system won't offer support for the two most popular movie formats. "Wii U does not have DVD or Blu-ray playback capabilities," he said bluntly. "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."
What do you think? Does the possibility of a cheaper buy-in ease the sting of not being able to watch physical media on the system? Do you agree with Iwata's statement that enough people already have a way to view those discs? Personally, I think it would have been interesting if users could shift movie playback from the console to the controller, similarly to how Nintendo's demos showed gameplay moving between the Wii U's two components.
[Via IGN]
[Thanks for the tip, Dominick!]
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