We know next to nothing about the new console that Nintendo is working on aside from the fact that it won’t run on Android. However, if a new patent filed by the company is anything to go by, the NX might be a “stationary game console” that doesn’t use discs. Instead, the console would use external cards and internal hard drives for storage.
Nintendo is always filing patents, just like Sony and Microsoft, so take that into consideration before you get too excited – or disappointed. We saw the patent posted on NeoGAF yesterday toward the end of our shift, and because it’s very technical, it made us cry. Luckily, Eurogamer broke things down for us a bit more. According to information gleaned from the patent filing with the USPTO, instead of an optical drive, the console patented includes an internal hard disc drive “storing a program and/or data, a communication unit transmitting/receiving a program and/or data via a network, and a processor executing a program stored in the hard disc drive to perform game processing.” Xbox One didn’t have disc drive when it was first conceptualized, so as EG points out, things may change down the road if this patent is indeed for the Nintendo NX system.