Nintendo: no DVD, BD playback for Wii U Nintendo's next-gen console, the Wii U, will, like its predecessor, have no DVD playback capabilities. It won't play Blu-ray Discs, either. Ninty boss Satoru Iwata confirmed the news during a Nintendo Q&A session following E3 last week. He said: "The reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that …
The man definitely has a point, I mean it's definitely not like the Gamecube lost out to a technically inferior console like the PS2 in part because the PS2 could also be used as a DVD player at no extra cost.
Oh, wait.
The Wii didn't suffer this fate against the PS3 or 360 primarily because the cost difference between them was enormous, but if the Wii U is going to be a significant upgrade from the Wii there's no hope in hell it's going to cost anywhere near £200 on launch, at which point why not at least give people with big disc libraries the option of playing them with their new box and reducing the total number of devices they own? I mean, the cost of adding the functionality's going to be at best fuck-all compared to the overall cost of the device - that bloody controller looks like it's going to cost the better part of £100 just by itself.
Of course, Nintendo are a bit schizophrenic at the best of times when it comes to predicting how new tech will fare - just look at how prescient they were with the Ultra 64^W^W Nintendo 64 using more expensive carts because nobody would want to use those gimmicky CD things...and that's before you look at the Cthuluesque monstrosity that they rolled out as a controller, presumably developed in response to the excessive comfort and ease of use present in other controllers on the market at the time.
Then there's the whole notion of having a Wii Shop that lets you buy game downloads but which took something like 4 or 5 years to implement a working demo system. When you compare it to the likes of Steam it doesn't look particularly impressive... In fact, fuck it - when you compare it to the average system used to sell Java apps to mobile phone users in about 2006 it doesn't look impressive.
They've made some great consoles and some truly amazing games, but it amazes me just how regularly Nintendo manage to make high-level decisions by thinking with someone's arse.
Right decision. Price is a key driver for consoles so why add even $20 at retail (likely much more for BluRay) to enable movie disc playback if you don't need to. This will sell in enough volume to justify an 'exclusive' drive part. Personally I'd look at a slightly undersized disc and a drive that was physically hacked so that it won't accept a full size Blu Disc. Having Physical discs is itself a defence against piracy and add a custom media and data format to add more layers of complexity.
It might not stop Chinese pros but it stops some guy in his garage in Liverpool.
Even if a *great deal* of punters don't have broadband fast enough to stream movies, they'll already have a plethora of devices capable of playing DVD's and some will have Blu Ray.
That's the reality - existing hardware.
Streaming movies is a nice thought, but really, this is not quite mainstream yet, if only because fast broadband is still a minority in terms of numbers in the UK. It looks like it's going to be some time before fast broadband is mainstream, given the snails pace BT moves at and their stranglehold on the infrastructure.
The other reality, whether you like it or not, is punters sharing movie and tv downloads with each other, in that good old fashioned illegal way - copy it onto a disc. The tech savvy punter will grab a torrent and the less tech savvy will end up with a copy - up and down the length of Britain, in offices everywhere, there's swapping going on.
The movie industry has no choice but to go with streaming - the disc will be all but dead in a decade.
My last four consoles have had the capability to play DVD's and I've not used it once. I did but controllers make for crappy remotes and a dedicated remote is a fair chunk of the price of a dedicated player.
Funny though, the new wii controller could make a superb remote
If nintendo wanted to be cheeky they could include a *proper* media player.
Cheekier still and they could include a torrent client ...
My TV has one (1!) HDMI slot. This justified the expense of an uber home cinema sound system with switchable hdmi.
Sounds sensible to me. If I was a shareholder I'd be happy.
Unlike Sony and MS, Nintendo like to make money on their hardware as well as the games. It can lower the price point for Wii U.
Apple disrupted the smart phone market by selling a smart phone that didn't do C'n'P.
M$ produced mail clients that didn't do SMTP.
If they have a proprietary BD format for games, and can alter the drive to read it, then how are pirates going to download and burn that image to blank media?
All the hacks to Wiis I'm aware of hit the DVD drive, and "fixed" it so that it couldn't tell any more what was an orginal game bough in a white box, and what was a DVD-R with a disk image burned to it. Nintendo faught it, but the firmware on the chips in these hardware hacks just got updated and the pirates were off again.
So Nintendo get to have more storage for the games - and if the graphics chips are that good, they'll need that for all the textures - which BD gives them. And they also get to screw the Pirates at the same time. Maybe they've turned round the motor, so it spins the disk the other way, or reads from the outside to the inside instead? Put the disk ID data on the outer edge, and writer software on PCs is screwed.
Your hardware then can't read any other media, but as you say, is that really a loss? Just don't sell the Wii U as a BD/DVD player. And kill piracy without some pretty major work by the pirates at the same time. HAve they said the Wii U is backwards compatible to the Wii?
Win-Win for Nintendo and the games companies?
well they best pray the new wii best be the dogs bollocks of game consoles. I used my xbox 360 and ps3 and also the drives to play dvd movies from lovefilm / my collection. If nintendo want people to use their console as their entertainment hub then it needs to do the basics - ie play a dvd.
In truth, I doubt I will own one of their new consoles - I really despised the cutesy cuddly wrap you in cotton wool feel of the current one. the controller was nothing shy of frustrating - even the kids don't use it any more.
"The reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray,"
Like Playstations and Xboxes?
I can understand that physical media is a dying breed. My PS3 isn't exactly battered by blu rays and dvds due to streaming services. But for the people that do still want and like to have physical media (or at least a device to play the media on should they ever need to) consolidation is a big selling point.
I only got a PS3 over an xbox so i wouldn't have to purchase a seperate blu ray player, which were rather pricey at the time, and occasionally me and mrs piezor like to take a retro trip to blockbuster and party like it's 1999.
Smart move to keep the costs down by nintendo.
Not so smart for turning away customers who do want to consolidate devices in their home and would be more likely to look to Sony (incompetence notwithstanding) or Microsoft.
Software distribution on disc through retail is dead. Apple knows this. Nintendo appear not to. They should have left out the 20th century tech optical drive altogether and just put a small hard disk (flash too expensive for Nintendo) and relied on software downloads. Then there would be no complaints or confusion about the drive not playing DVD and BD.
How many times does it have to be said - the infrastructure does not exist universally to support downloads of the scale required for films or games.
I have a lovely, stable, unlimited and fast (for the UK) connection, but a 25GB game is still going to take a few hours to download (same goes for films).
Then we get into the storage - current consoles aren't shipping with more than 250GB drives. So you can only have 10 games on your shiney new console. Ever. Even if we jump that up to a 1TB drive, it's still only 40 games (assuming max'd disc).
As for all the comments on streaming films instead of BD. Really? You have a stable connection that can permanantly stream 36Mbps?? I have the full set-up, BD, home theatre, the whole lot and other than an actual BD rip, nothing compares to it for picture or sound.
Finally, we should probably remember that Ninty will have to pay Sony and Phillips a fee, as long as they use any optical storage method. They do hold almost all of the relavant patents in that area.
I can see why they aren't bothering with BR, but DVD playback would cost almost nothing. Being able to get rid of the legacy DVD player (especially since everyone has a DVR now) would be very useful and save some precious space under the tv, not least the insane mess of wires that connect everything up.
Being able to turn the controller into a portable DVD player you can use around the house and garden would be a major plus.
Nintendo knows they can take the console price and development time and apply it all to making the best game-player possible, or split some of those resources off to making it play discs - that other devices already do.
I think Nintendo thinks their best shot at doing well with the "U" is to make it the best game-player-per-dollar it can be.
"perhaps he thinks we'll all be downloading HD movies by the time the Wii U appears"
I stream HD video off Netflix NOW, as do enough Americans that Netflix accounts for the single largest chunk of prime time internet traffic. I still watch discs occasionally, but not very often. By the time Wii U hits I'm sure the rest of the world will see how profitable Netflix is and we'll be seeing clones in the rest of the world.
Besides, just like with the Wii, the Wii U will play DVDs and posibly Blu-Rays. You'll just have to wait for the home brewers to make it happen.
This was a stupid argument at the release of the Wii, and it still a stupid argument. Take the simplest of scenarios - kid's room with one TV and one Nintendo device. For the 8 dollars or so (if that) it would cost Nintendo to include DVD playback, why insist everyone "already has a DVD player" and act like this is redundant. @ssholes, the device is already in there. Make me homebrew to play DVDs? Seriously? Then Sony and Microsoft must be fools for including the feature, right?
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