Nintendo have never been known for doing things by the book. The Wii itself was an entirely revolutionary concept, and with the announcement of the Wii U, it's newest home console, which is set for launch next year, Nintendo have again proven that they aren't afraid to re-write the rules from time to time. But as innovative as they can be, Nintendo can also be stubborn - and it looks like that's not about to change any time soon.
Along with its new, proprietary disk format, which can store 25 GB of data, the Wii U is also fully backwards-compatible with Wii disks, which are standard DVDs. And while many were hoping the console would allow you to watch films, and view pictures stored on standard DVDs through the Wii U, it seems Nintendo have again refused to include support for DVD playback. Although it's not as if they don't have their reasons.
The new Wii U controller. Just don't try playing any games on it.
As Nintendo President Satoru Iwata confirmed to Kotaku, "The reason for that is 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."And while it's certainly true that we all already have plenty of devices that play DVDs, not many of those would have been able to stream a DVD to a controller screen that you could watch elsewhere in the house. Seemingly, Nintendo are happy to miss out on what could have been another neat feature. If it means a better price for us, however, we'll be happy to forgive them.
