New Patent From Nintendo Suggests Discless System
Console-making companies flirted with the possibility of leaving the disc slot out of today’s current-gen machines (like the PS4 and XBox One), but decided the time wasn’t right. I never would have expected Nintendo to be the first to dare cutting discs out, given how behind the times they can sometimes be, but some new evidence has surfaced that seems to suggest they’re thinking about it.
Last February Nintendo filed a design for a new device with the US Patent Office. The schematic was discovered by NeoGAF this week and shows what anyone would guess is a game-playing machine, which doesn’t have a disc slot.
While this console schematic doesn’t include a disc-reading drive, that doesn’t necessarily mean it only plays downloadable games. There is also a “memory card” slot for “First Basic Program” and “Second Basic Program,” words that are repeated next to the processing units — which implies the machine would take data cards similar to SD. It makes sense, now that such cards have caught up with Blu-Ray in terms of data storage, and could hold even more content in the future.
No one can confirm if this is a design for the NX or for a different, unrelated machine. Nintendo has not commented on the patent registration, and is unlikely to.