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Comment by jrace | Hacker News Reader

Exactly my thought!

But why? There must be a reason to use something different than what is normal made.

It's an attention to detail to make the discs more kid-friendly, probably. Just like how Nintendo made their carts taste bad[1] so that kids don't try to eat them, while other vendors just left the plastic as is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30076389 - Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad (2017)

Vendor locking. Maybe with the inner edge rounded they will be difficult to read in normal dvd or blu ray players.

Feels nicer to handle. No sharp edges. It doesn't affect reading at all.

I have a spool of blank blu-ray-r discs somewhere that are similarly rounded off, and caused me confusion about how proprietary nintendo's discs actually are.

I remember the way it felt, it was distinct and pleasant. It was a nice little addition to the overall UX of the console

I loved my Wii U. I remember thinking that something felt different but never really processing exactly what it was. Maybe it was just because on other platforms I have barely used disks for a long time.

I am surprised to find this out and it does explain a lot. It really was a nicer disk.

Exactly, and it's not just about reading but also (perhaps even more so) about writing. If Nintendo control the manufacture of their proprietary disk, well, it's unlikely that a pirate outfit will be able to build a disk manufacturing factory that produces something compatible with retail Wii U's they can then sell their own non-Nintendo licensed games on. Or burn Nintendo's own games onto. The cartridge era of games were much easier to reproduce the physical medium onto, and this was super-widespread.

This did break down for Sony later on in a way it hasn't for the Nintendo Switch, a widely shared opinion on why the PS Vita flopped was because it was incompatible with standard SD cards _and_ that their own flash game cart and memory card offerings were so incredibly expensive. (And there were cheap SD-to-PSVita adapters that were released anyway. [0])

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Vita#Hardware

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