Once again, Brazil's National Institute of Intellectual Property has given us clues about PlayStation's plans. After revealing the design of the PS5 developer kit , the patent office has now published an application related to the physical appearance of a mysterious cartridge about which we currently know very little.
Playstation 5 with cartridges?
Before you panic, don't worry. This patent could be for something completely different from what you might be thinking, or, as is often the case, it could simply be a patent that serves only to reserve the rights to an idea. In any case, the document is managed by the company Kaszner Leonardos, the design is by Yujin Morisawa , and the patent belongs to Sony Interactive Entertainment.
All these details coincide with the initial appearance of the PS5 development kit patent, something that has been confirmed and, therefore, gives this new finding a lot of credibility. The question is whether we are truly facing an element that will be part of PS5. We know Sony will use triple-layer Blu-Ray discs to deliver up to 100GB of data, and to this day PlayStation has never released a cartridge-based home console, so all of this is suspect.
Sony and cartridges
The only cartridge console released by Sony was the small PlayStation Vita, although by now Sony has made it clear on more than one occasion that they are not interested in trying the handheld market again, partly because of the failure of the Vita and the great growth that mobile phones have experienced as gaming platforms.
But as Tweak Town points out, the cartridge might not be related to PlayStation. In 2017, a patent for a physical cartridge surfaced unexpectedly, and it wasn't until 2018 that it began to be marketed. What exactly was the cartridge? It was simply an accessory for the Sony Toio , a children's toy that Sony sells in Japan and that uses this type of cartridge. Does this mean that this cartridge is for a toy and not for PlayStation? It would be easy to think so if it weren't for the similarities between this patent and the one for the PS5 development kit.
That said, we can only continue to look carefully at the image of the cartridge, an enigmatic element that could hold the key to the next generation. Or maybe we are just dealing with a random design that will be forgotten. Who knows, maybe in the end even Sony has been encouraged to launch a new laptop to accompany the launch of PlayStation 5. Impossible, right?