Report: Nintendo NX will use cartridges, not discs

The Wall Street Journal is reporting "people familiar with the matter" have stated that Nintendo will go back to some form of cartridge as the storage medium for games on the NX, the company’s upcoming console.

"Industry watchers said cartridges were a reasonable choice for Nintendo’s next-generation system, code-named NX, because the company targets a wider range of consumers than Sony or Microsoft," the Wall Street Journal stated. "Nintendo’s core fans include small children, who might scratch discs but find cartridges tougher to damage. Cartridges also allow games to load faster, are harder to copy and can be mass-produced faster than discs, they said."

This matches up with earlier rumors that the console would use cartridges rather than optical discs, as well as reports the system would have some portable component and feature controllers that could detach from the central hardware. Nintendo has released next to no information about the console officially.

Even if Nintendo decides to go with cartridge-based media rather than optical discs for physical copies of its games, it’s likely that the NX will also offer some way to purchase and download games without purchasing a physical copy.