Nintendo has made a habit of bucking market trends and logic, and that doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon as Tech Insider reports the company may be looking to go back to using gaming cartridges rather than industry standard optical discs for their new console the Nintendo NX.
While this might seem like a strange move, or one just aimed at exploiting nostalgia (shut up and take my money!), it’s actually a potential solution for having to install games onto consoles from discs before playing them, as most modern titles require.
You see, despite the fact that most modern games use the latest Blu-ray discs, even those aren’t fast enough to keep up with how fast the consoles can read the information. Having to wait while a new game installs before you play it so the console can read it directly from its own hard drive, while certainly teaching a lesson or two about patience and expectation, is hardly a market-pleasing solution.
Going back to cartridges then – allowing good old fashion plug and play gaming – doesn’t seem such a crazy idea.
Nintendo don’t think so either it seems, as Macronix – the company responsible for the proprietary media format used for the Nintendo 3DS handheld game console cartridges – has recently filed financial reports citing Nintendo’s new platform as a big driver of financial growth for the company in the later months of this year and early 2017.
Coinciding with the recently announced March 2017 release of the Nintendo NX, the new console using a format similar to the company’s hugely popular handheld devices, would be in keeping with their unorthodox decision-making recently.
With Macronix’s 32-nanometer ROM chip used in the 3DS cartridges capable of holding 8 GB of media, the new 75-nanometer ROM chip is capable of holding far more data. And while it might not be a revival of the heyday of classic cartridge gaming, the days of CD domination may soon be over.
