Sony files a patent for a new game cartridge, but what is it?

The PlayStation Vita is no longer directly supported by Sony for several years, the company preferring to focus all its resources on the PlayStation 4. However, it appeared (briefly) that Game cartridges still had a place at Sony if a recent patent filing was indicated.

A South Korean patent filing, spotted by the Dutch TechTastic website, was released this month. "Electronic game cartridge". This is unlike anything we have seen before with a video game system, with a big round hole on one side and a port at the bottom of the other. It looks a lot like the Apple block that surrounds its headset when it comes with an iPhone, and it does not seem like it will go into a system .

As pointed out by one of our readers however, the device also looks like a piece of the Toio children's toys platform, which Sony first revealed in 2017. The piece in question connects to the top, though it actually corresponds to the images of the patent.

A year ago, Andrew House, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, left office and said that there was "no huge market opportunity" for a dedicated portable gaming system out of Japan. The Nintendo Switch has managed to bridge the gap between handheld consoles and traditional consoles thanks to its hybrid design, but its games are not based on the same type of power as in Sony's own titles. Sony is back in the notebook market. Despite the commercial failure of the Vita, it was an impressive system capable of producing stunning visual effects and benefiting from the particular support of Japanese and independent developers.

We hope that the cartridges could still make their comeback, possibly with the next generation. PlayStation. For the moment, we know very little concrete information about the system, but Sony has confirmed that something was in preparation. Microsoft has provided nearly as much information about the next generation of Xbox systems, although it has been reported that there are actually two different consoles. One will be a traditional system similar to Xbox One, while the other will be a cheaper, all-digital system designed to take advantage of the xCloud project.

Updated November 27, 2018: updated to reflect the images could be the same as the Toio children's toys platform.