Why has Nintendo not allowed installing games from disc to the WiiU?

[the8thark]

That said, I'm curious. Why do you guys regard this as an issue?

• Faster load times. Optical disc reading is getting to be too slow in the modern era. Playing the game direct from SSD is much faster and for certain games like XCX, it's needed, well at the least 10GB of update patches to have 1/3 of the game on your SSD to make it more playable. In the future this will become more and more of an issue. Less loading times is important to prevent popup and other in game issues.
  
  
• Preventing the optical drive laser and other parts from wearing out. It does happen.
  
  
• Installing large games all at once so you can have multi disc games without having to swap discs. You're then not limited to one disc for a game. A game can be over 25GB and you just install it with 2 discs. You just keep one disc in the drive so the game checks you own the game. And that's it. Zero swapping discs during play. You would need an external HDD for this or the NX having more than 32GB of internal SSD space though.

Just 3 reasons I thought up. There are more though.

 

[Emma]

Preventing the optical drive laser and other parts from wearing out. It does happen..

I should add to this. While a lot of things were improved this generation in all three consoles, the construction quality of their optical drives is continuing to get worse every generation. They get more fragile and cheaply made each time while other parts all get improvements. The drives on the current consoles, Wii U included, wear out much more quickly this time around. Due to the poor construction AND the higher demands today's games put on it. So the drives will fail. It's not a question of if, but when. Some unlucky people have had them fail almost right away. Usually though that won't happen right away unless you accidentally apply too much force. Because it has to do with wear and tear and indivudal defects, it's impossible guess how long they'd last. Could last six months, 16, or 26. Totally random. But many are going to fail before the generation is over. Worse the more you use the drive. Which is going to be a lot if you're a purist that insists on having physical copies over digital downloads.

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

I should add to this. While a lot of things were improved this generation in all three consoles, the construction quality of their optical drives is continuing to get worse every generation. They get more fragile and cheaply made each time while other parts all get improvements. The drives on the current consoles, Wii U included, wear out much more quickly this time around. Due to the poor construction AND the higher demands today's games put on it. So the drives will fail. It's not a question of if, but when. Some unlucky people have had them fail almost right away. Usually though that won't happen right away unless you accidentally apply too much force. Because it has to do with wear and tear and indivudal defects, it's impossible guess how long they'd last. Could last six months, 16, or 26. Totally random. But many are going to fail before the generation is over. Worse the more you use the drive. Which is going to be a lot if you're a purist that insists on having physical copies over digital downloads.

But I still prefer the idea of pop in and play. If I were to buy a console (and if I did, it would undoubtedly be the Wii U), I would buy it BECAUSE I can load discs in and expect to play games right off the bat. If I wanted to install games, I wouldn't bother. That's what my PC for.

 

[Zonda]

It's certainly interesting, given the Wii-U seems a lot more restricted than rival companies' last gen consoles.

 

[ii_]

Well, one way of doing this is to homebrew your Wii U. Using a disc ripper application.