Over the weekend, news started trickling out about a recently published game console patent filed by Nintendo back in February. That's not that surprising—we've known for a while that the company is working on a new console project codenamed "NX." What's more surprising is that the "example system" described in the patent explicitly "is not provided with an optical disk drive for reading out a program and/or data from an optical disk."

Companies patent things that don't come to the market all the time, of course, and there's no specific indication this patent will even form the basis of Nintendo's NX. Still, the very existence of a patented console design without an optical disc drive got us thinking: is the console market finally ready to graduate from the CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs that have been the cornerstone of console game distribution for decades now? Do game consoles still need physical media at all?

A connected world

In the US, at least, quickly increasing broadband adoption has made this a question worth considering. By the end of 2013, 70 percent of all US adults had a broadband connection in the home. That number shot up to 81 percent when you look at the 18- to 29-year-olds that provide the core market for most AAA games (and 77 percent among 30- to 49-year-olds), numbers that are likely even higher two years on.

There are other signs that console gamers are even more likely to have broadband access than the population at large. Back in 2010, 78 percent of US PS3 owners and 73 percent of US Xbox 360 owners already had broadband access. Those ratios have almost surely increased in the last five years, as overall broadband adoption has slowly increased in the US. Those that still lack broadband access in the US are overwhelmingly those in households that make less than $50,000 a year; i.e. those that are the least likely to have significant disposable income to spend on video games (ignoring for a moment other, more serious side effects of the "digital divide"). And while downloadable games are getting bigger, average connection speeds are generally increasing at a similar pace in the US (and globally).

While broadband still isn't as ubiquitous as household staples like the telephone or TV in the developed world, it's clear the number of console gamers without a high-speed Internet connection is a small and quickly shrinking minority. Console makers have already noted this shift to some extent. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony now make every retail game available for download on the same day they're available in stores. Sony and Microsoft pack-in large internal hard drives of up to one terabyte, and all three systems allow for external USB hard drives to aid in the backup storage of as many downloaded games as possible.

A brave new world

For the console makers, there are some financial benefits to a download-only console world that might make up for the small numbers of lost offline gamers, as well. Cutting out the retail middleman by selling direct downloads means higher direct profit margins for the console maker and the publisher, not to mention reduced disc printing and distribution costs.

A world without retail games is also likely a world without resellable used games, which many publishers (fairly or unfairly) see as taking money directly from their pockets. Of course, the last time there was talk of removing game-resale capability from a console, there was a consumer revolt that forced Microsoft into an abrupt and damaging turnaround. As time goes on, though, it seems likely more and more consumers are going to give up the option of reselling an old game for the convenience of a direct download, as they have in other media.

But console makers might not even have to give up the offline market in transitioning to a disc-free system. In addition to an internal hard drive, Nintendo's patent makes reference to an external memory card that can hold two "basic programs." That kind of reusable memory card could act as a sort of bridge for gamers who still want or need to purchase their games at a retail store. Imagine Internet-connected kiosks set up at major retailers worldwide where gamers could purchase and copy the latest games to a personal memory card, then transfer them more permanently to a hard drive when they got home.

Nintendo is already a pioneer in this kind of game distribution; in the '80s, Japanese gamers could use a Famicom Disk Writer kiosk to get their games home from the store. More recently, Microsoft tested a similar kiosk system at the Windows Store for PC software. With generic, reusable 64GB SD cards going for as low as $20 these days, printing and shipping millions of optical discs begins to look less appealing than letting players simply copy downloaded games from the store directly.

After nearly 40 years, it may seem hard to envision a world in which console games no longer come on static physical media. Then again, 15 years ago it was hard to imagine a world in which most PC games weren't sold in huge boxes on specialty store shelves. Today, it's hard to find a PC player that still buys games on optical discs. We may be reaching a point where console players are in the same boat in the near future.