As players continue to reel from Sony’s announcement that the company will stop producing physical discs for its games starting in 2028, fans of physical media have suffered another blow. It just got a lot harder for Nintendo to produce physical Switch game cartridges. According to David Gibson, a senior analyst at MST Financial, Nintendo’s main partner for making the ROM chips used for physical Switch 1 and 2 games is “phasing out” its partnership with the company.
The chairman says capacity is limited and is going to NOR and eMMC memory chips instead.” Gibson wrote that he doesn’t believe this will instantly spell the death of physical releases for Nintendo Switch games. But at the margin, digital will grow, through more Game-Key Cards (which hold a download key, not the game) and digital-only sales.” Gibson cited that 61.5% of Nintendo’s software sales from April to June were digital, a 2.2% increase from last year. Following backlash over Sony’s announcement that it won’t produce discs in the future, a Nintendo executive confirmed the company will continue supporting physical media.
We’re barely just over a year into NS2. It’s got both digital and physical – that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical.
We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic.” While van Zyll’s comments suggest Nintendo plans to keep selling cartridges, it remains to be seen how Macronix’s exit will affect the company’s strategy. Fewer ROM chips likely means game card production costs will rise, creating additional financial incentive for Nintendo to stop producing physical games altogether. Nintendo already charges more for certain games physically than digitally, a policy that began earlier this year with Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which went for $60 on the Nintendo eShop and $70 for physical copies.
Beyond this, Nintendo has been criticized for how it handles Switch 2 game-key cards. In some cases, physical copies of Switch 2 games don’t actually include the game on the cartridge; instead, they act as a “key” that lets the user download the game from the Nintendo eShop. Beyond taking up a lot of space on the Switch 2's hard drive, the big problem with this key-driven approach is that if Nintendo ever shut down the Switch 2’s eShop, players would no longer be able to access their digital games.
While the Wii U and 3DS stores still let players download previously bought games, you can’t make new purchases, which makes it seem inevitable that these servers will eventually be wound down entirely. For the sake of game preservation, let's hope not.
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