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Wii U can't play DVDs or Blu-rays

Nintendo couldn't justify the costs.

Dark blue icons of video game controllers on a light blue background
Image credit: Eurogamer
Wesley Yin-Poole avatar
News by Wesley Yin-Poole Former Editor-in-Chief
Updated on
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The Wii U cannot play DVDs or Blu-rays, Nintendo has confirmed.

Why? Because you've already got machines that play them.

"Wii U does not have DVD or Blu-ray playback capabilities," president Satoru Iwata told investors.

"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."

Instead, the Wii U, out next year, features a single self-loading media bay that plays 12-centimetre proprietary high-density optical discs, as well as 12-centimetre Wii optical discs.

That's that then.

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