Nintendo’s physical Switch 2 game cards may have suffered their worst blow since the handheld console hit the scene last year. David Gibson, the games-focused analyst at MST Financial, reported late on Tuesday that the main manufacturer of the flash memory inside Switch game cards, Macronix, is “quitting the Switch business.” The reason why is simple: game cards are not a big money maker.
Gibson says that its ROM storage business made up less than 5% of Macronix’s sales last quarter. That’s down from 23% a year ago. Its other business is making eMMC and NAND storage, which is eclipsing the sales of the small storage solution used for Nintendo’s physical games.
1/4 Nintendo's main memory chip maker is quitting the Switch business
Macronix, which makes the ROM chips in Switch 1 and Switch 2 game memory cards, is phasing out that business. There will be no new ROM products, and Q3 is the last quarter it reports ROM sales separately.— David Gibson (@gibbogame) November 4, 2026
Macronix is not Nintendo’s sole provider of memory for physical cartridges. Still, it was the main supplier, and if Nintendo does not find a replacement, it could spell even worse tidings for future game card releases. Gibson said we may not see an impact immediately, but having fewer suppliers will inevitably push Nintendo to emphasize digital games even harder. According to Circana’s chief gaming analyst Mat Piscatella, U.S. physical game sales saw the slightest bump this year thanks mostly to Switch 2. At the same time, the “overwhelming” majority of game sales are digital now. Piscatella wrote back in June that we “likely have less than a decade left of physical software.”
Already this year, Nintendo started selling physical game cards for a $10 premium compared to digital titles. Some of the more optimistic folk online took this to mean that Nintendo was discounting digital titles, but that’s not exactly how the numbers play out. Some of the Nintendo-published titles like Fire Emblem: Fortunes Weave cost $70 for a digital version and $80 for a physical edition. In its last earnings report back in August, Nintendo said that just under 60% of all sales on its platforms were for digital titles. We may hear more about Macronix at Nintendo’s next earnings call set to take place this week.
This is even worse news for third-party games. Already, most developers and publishers have been incentivized to roll with game-key cards, which have practically no game data housed inside. They act as a form of physical DRM (digital rights management) that requires you to insert them into the console to download and play your games. The only benefit to a game-key card is the way you can trade and sell off those cards when you’re done. However, it loses the same appeal when you remember that game’s value is tied directly to Nintendo’s servers remaining online in perpetuity.
I’ve been clanging the warning bells for months now about how the compounding memory shortage is dismantling the supply chain necessary for physical games. Nintendo’s latest game cards come in sizes up to 64GB, and anything requiring more memory will be more expensive to produce. For third-party publishers, a physical card release is being treated like a collector’s item. Physical copies of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Oblivion Remastered and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle—two games wholly housed on-card—sold out quickly after launch. With its main supplier jumping ship, we may see Nintendo treat game cards as the growing rarity they’re becoming over time.
