Wii Launch and Price Revealed

[thatmariolover]

Originally Posted by Perfect Stu

only having tons of PS2s in Japanese households payed off like a mother****** after a few years...

and even then, your point holds no ground because DVD tech was a million times more expensive in the late 90's than it is now.

i dont think its a big deal at all whether or not the Nintendo Wii has DVD playback...going with what has been said, pretty much everyone has a DVD player by now. thing is, i like having more devices with DVD playback so that I dont have to have a DVD player hooked up to whatever TV the game system is hooked up to. that helped quite a bit living in residence last year...used my PS2 as a DVD player.

There are two costs associated with creating a machine that plays DVD movies. The first is the actual cost of the technology to read DVD's and display them. The second is the licensing permissions to create a machine that's allowed to play DVD movies. There's a patent on it, you have to pay your royalties.

Referring to my post holding no ground, if you had read my post in its entirety I stated that "obviously [the PS2 phenominon] wouldn't be echoed with the Wii." Back in the early 90's the actual technology was expensive, but since the Xbox and PS2 were already using the technology (and the fact that DVD players were still relatively rare) it made sense for them to also invest in the semi-costly license to be allowed to run DVD movies. Now that DVD technology is cheap, and the actual costs involved are with the rights to make the machine and not the machine itself; coupled with the fact that most people already have DVD players, Nintendo just decided to leave it out for now. I have no doubt that Nintendo could later offer a firmware update over their online service that you purchase for DVD playback.