Could The Nintendo NX Be Optical Drive-less?

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It’s no secret that Nintendo is already working on a successor to the Wii U. Announced back in March, Nintendo didn’t give much information about the new home console, dubbed Nintendo NX, but a patent filing posted by a NeoGAF user may have more details on what gamers can expect from the long time gaming company.

The biggest detail in the patent filing is the omission of an optical drive of any sort. This has led to speculation of one of two things: digital only distribution or a return to the cartridge based system of consoles from yesteryear. Personally the digital only distribution sounds like the more logical choice, although the drawings in the patent filing do contain mention of a memory card slot of some sort.

Nintendo-NX-Patent-Filing
Diagram included in the latest patent filing for a new Nintendo console. Could it be the Nintendo NX?

As you can see from the diagram above, everything else one would expect in a console is there – external hard drive support, controller, and display connections. It is interesting that the memory card portion indicates first and second basic program functionality so it may very well indicate that games could be run off of a card of some sort instead of a DVD or Blu-ray disc – which would definitely cut down on the size of the console itself. It’s not that big of a stretch as other Nintendo offerings like the DS systems use a card system to deliver games and the amount of storage space on memory cards is always increasing.

On the other side of the coin, it is possible that this means that Nintendo is planning on a digital distribution only platform, however this could cause major issues amongst gamers with poor Internet connections or no Internet connections at all.

What are your thoughts on the recent Nintendo patent filing? Could this be related to the Nintendo NX and if so do you think it’s more likely Nintendo will use memory cards or digital downloads to deliver games to it? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

[button type=”link” link=”http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1099932″ variation=”btn-danger” target=”blank”]Source: NeoGAF[/button]

Last Updated on November 27, 2018.

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