During an E3 Expo Analyst Q&A Session, which was held on June 8, and recently added to Nintendo’s official website, President Satoru Iwata confirmed that the Nintendo Wii U will not support DVD or Blu-ray playback.

When asked about multimedia functionality on the Wii U, Iwata’s response was:

Wii U does not have DVD or Blu-ray playback capabilities.

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.

A pretty straight forward response from Iwata, so for those still actually looking for something to play their DVDs or Blu-rays on, will need to use another system or player.