Nintendo Wii U will not play DVDs or Blu-ray

If you was hoping to buy the Nintendo Wii U next year and use it to watch DVD or Blu-ray discs think again, we have recently heard that it will not allow playback of either of these formats.

Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata recently said “Wii U does not have DVD or Blu-ray playback capabilities” and added “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”.

To be honest with you we can understand both sides of the argument, most people do already have DVD and Blu-ray players so they don’t really need the Wii U to offer this functionality, however on the other hand if Nintendo’s upcoming console did allow for this it would be another selling point.

This news comes courtesy of VG247 following a Nintendo Q&A session which was posted on Nintendo.co.jp, what do you make of this news? Does it disappoint you? Or do you agree that everyone probably has a DVD or Blu-ray player by now?