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. “Nintendo’s main memory chip maker is quitting the Switch business,” Gibson wrote on X about the Taiwanese semiconductor company Macronix. “There will be no new ROM products, and Q3 is the last quarter it reports ROM sales separately.”
As for why Macronix is doing this, Gibson explained that “ROM fell to 5% of Macronix’s Q3 sales, from 26% a year ago (-39% YoY, +9% QoQ). 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. “My view: Macronix isn’t Nintendo’s only game memory card maker, so physical cards will likely carry on for some time. 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 .
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