In a curious move from Nintendo, the company has announced that its next generation console – the WiiU, claimed to be more powerful than a PS3 – will be incapable of playing DVDs or Blu-rays. Nintendo attributes the lack of functionality to not being able to justify the cost of inclusion.

“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.”

We can understand the lack of Blu-ray functionality, but not being able to watch DVDs on the WiiU comes as a bit of a surprise. Nintendo may have a point about consumers already having devices to watch movies on, but it still feels like an unexpected shortcoming.

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