When Nintendo finally stopped producing cartridges for home consoles in 2001, the games industry breathed a sigh of relief. Finally! Nintendo was waking up to a modern era, one in which plummeting media prices and rising memory capacities made old cartridges look obsolete.

Now, Nintendo is in a peculiar position—one in which it may not only return to chip-based media for its upcoming "NX" home system's software, but also one in which doing so may look like a good move.

The savvy reporters at British media-reporting site Screen Critics were first to notice a major financial report from Macronix, a Japanese company that has provided memory-related chips to consoles as far back as the N64. Macronix had already commented on serving as a chip supplier of some sort for Nintendo NX in January of this year, but in speaking about its current fiscal year (which, for Japanese companies, ends in March 2017), the company spoke about higher expectations for its "NOR Flash" business linked to the launch of the new Nintendo hardware.

This leaves open the possibility that Macronix will simply provide the kind of BIOS or system memory chips that it has made for systems such as the Wii U and PlayStation 4. Still, the announcement's verbiage hints to an expected jump in sales percentage around the NX's launch window that would make more sense if linked to software sales, as opposed to console sales—assuming an average games-to-console sales ratio of over 2:1, at any rate.

The biggest detail lacking in Screen Critics' report is any confirmation that Macronix's next fiscal year will include a ramping-up of 32GB-capacity chips—and selling such chips to Nintendo at a cost comparable to Blu-ray discs. Comparatively, the Nintendo 3DS portable system has a maximum cartridge size of 8GB, which is based on the system's spec when it launched in early 2011.

NX as a top-loader?

Call them whatever you want-—flash drives, cartridges, game sticks—but this retro-sounding idea has some forward-thinking goodness to it. Macronix's financial report requires a lot of reading between the lines, but it also hints to a seemingly obvious path for Nintendo's next system. The reason being: Optical discs ain't what they used to be.

The Nintendo Wii U is the only current-gen home console to actively load software from its discs, while both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 require disc-based games to dump their files onto a hard drive. Those games are playable without any downloads or Internet connections, but ultimately, the discs get more mileage as DRM checks than as storage media. Optical drives can't keep up with modern CPU and GPU data bandwidth demands—a fact that any Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 veteran can attest to after seeing so many of their games' blurry, slowly buffering textures.

While ROM production would probably cost more than optical discs, the assumption is that the wholesale cost wouldn't be that much more per unit—and certainly not as much as N64 cartridges cost compared to CD-ROMs in the late '90s. Plus, Nintendo's FY2017 projection included statements that the new console would not be sold at a loss. A quick path to that would be removing a bulky, expensive optical disc drive—and perhaps selling an entry-level NX model with a smaller amount of on-board flash memory, or none at all.

If a 32GB ROM chip, with a large-enough rewritable sector for patch support, could replace both a Blu-ray disc and rewritable system memory—without ramping up costs a la the 64DD—then that would be a pretty forward-looking way to treat the old dinosaur that is physical media on game consoles. Even as it has toyed with DLC, Nintendo has continued to prioritize getting finished versions of games into stores, and if the production cost can stay close to discs, then a flash card or a retro-looking cartridge would work out in Nintendo's favor. And until Nintendo decides to open up its systems to whatever software we want to install, this may be the best we can hope for.

A lot of "if"s have to add up for this theory to pan out, of course, but at the very least, third-party game producers have proven willing to shell out for proprietary media in the form of 3DS cartridges, and those third parties have Nintendo's eShop as a viable, no-cost-per-unit alternative no matter what media Nintendo decides on. So much remains to be seen about what shape and form Nintendo NX will take, but we see at least one opportunity for Nintendo to lead in the console space, not follow.