[Theory] Nintendo made rounded discs and a separate Wii channel for the same reason: Piracy prevention
It seems odd that Nintendo would choose to force you to boot up a separate channel altogether if you want to play Wii games/old downloaded titles on the Wii U, doesn’t it? After all, every prior backwards-compatible Nintendo console just lets you play previous-generation games in the same way that you play the proprietary games on the system. Even 3DS puts your DSiWare titles on the main menu, as though they’re eShop games.
So why the change?
Well, I have a theory. You know how Wii U discs have rounded edges? At first I thought that was just a nice little touch to make people enjoy touching the sides of their games more (which admittedly did happen), but after a real examination of it I came to the conclusion that it was probably done to prevent piracy. After all, if you illegally download a pirated Wii U game onto an regular disc– no matter how good your Wii U hack or homebrew channel is– the console will just say “Hey dude, this disc doesn’t have rounded edges! It must not be a real Wii U game!”, spitting it back out and thus preventing you from pirating Wii U games. At least until someone gets a workaround.
But wait!, I thought, If it can’t read “regular” edge’d discs, how will it read the good ol’ Wii discs!?
Thus we begin to understand why Nintendo might have put in a separate channel for Wii games. When you open up the channel, it tells the system “Okay dawg, reboot yourself and drop the whole ‘No Reading Regular Disc Shapes’ thing for a bit.”
Then when you go back into “Wii U” mode, it turns the safety check back on.
Just a thought. And I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case! Anyone else come to different conclusions?
