While we know Nintendo’s Wii U touts a ‘proprietary’ disc format for games, a question looming is if it will be able to playback DVD or Blu-ray media from the same drive. According to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in a recent Q&A session, the answer is no, citing cost concerns over patents:

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.

Nintendo’s stance on this hasn’t change since the Wii, then. For convenience’s sake, it is nice to have a console that does have the option of playing disc-based movies, but we reckon it’s far from a deal breaker for the majority.

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