Fresh Nintendo Patents Hints at Future and Possible Innovations

Nintendo clearly aren’t a company to wallow in self-pity, so it was little surprise when they announced a mysterious new games console in March, the Nintendo “NX”, assumedly a machine that will allow them to contend with the PS4 and Xbox One more directly than before. Companies file for patents all the time.

Forum members on NeoGAF stumbled across a US patent filing application (20150231511) that was filed by Nintendo Co., LTD. The example system is not provided with an optical disk drive for reading out a program and/or data from an optical disk. Servers will distribute games data to “Game Apparatus”.

While the patent bears some relation to the Wii U in most notably referring to “wireless communication with a wireless operation device having an operation unit, a display unit and a battery”, the device largely revolves around having been adapted in response to advances in high-speed communication. Not everyone has a decent internet connection and games these days are pretty large in size.

Check out the two images that was attached by Nintendo with the patent application.

This is a major hint from Nintendo that NX is going to be the first major home console with “Digital Only” feature. In theory, all game and save data would be stored on a hard-drive.

It’s all just speculation at this point. Regardless, things are beginning to get interesting with the NX. Nevertheless, this seems like an idea that Nintendo is exploring.