Has Nintendo got its head in the clouds?

A highly detailed new patent suggests that the NX will use cloud computing, and be both a portable and home console.

Officially we know absolutely nothing about Nintendo’s next console, except for its codename of NX and the promise from Nintendo that it is very different to the Wii and Wii U.

But a recently registered patent may give a detailed glimpse of what Nintendo is planning, and interestingly it does jive with popular rumours that the NX will be an all-in-one portable and home console.

The patent describes a game console, implied to be portable, which you can attach to a ‘supplemental computing device’ in order to provide additional ‘processing resources’.


A portable and home console in one

As is common with patents a lot of the description is frustrating vague, but the console is described as taking ‘the form of any suitable type of computing device, e.g., mobile, semi-mobile, semi-stationary, or stationary’.



There’s even a section where it talks about possible wearable devices that are ‘capable of sending communications and performing functions’.

Reading between the lines the idea seems to be that when the console is plugged in at home it can process games ‘at a nearly real-time speed’, but you can add more than one of the supplemental computing devices – either wirelessly or physically – to improve the graphics and performance.

Is this really how the NX is going to work?

When you’re using it as a portable some features will become unavailable, or the graphics will be worse, although it seems you can get something close to home performance if you have a good Wi-Fi connection.

The basic logic behind the set-up is similar to the Xbox One game Crackdown 3, which uses the cloud to create highly complex destruction effects that the Xbox One alone would not be able to do. But when you play the game offline the graphics are very much simpler, albeit it still good.

Interestingly, the patent also talks about rewarding you if you allow your supplemental computing device to be shared by others, creating a wireless network running its own processor cloud for other NX owners to tap into.

Now that’s community gaming

Of course if Nintendo’s relying on cloud technology the question is who’s? It seems impossible to imagine they’d be doing it on their own, but they do have a history of team up with other big name tech companies such as IBM.

The usual caveats for any patent hold true here though, in that there’s no guarantee that what this describes is in anyway connected with NX, or that it is even something Nintendo has any intention of making as a commercial product.

That said, the amount of detail, and the nature of what it’s describing, does match up very closely to previous rumours – including the hint from Nintendo that the NX is completely different from anything Nintendo has released before.

Not what you’d expect from Nintendo

Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter