Overview
- Macronix announced in its recent financial report that it will stop making ROM products for game cartridges and will no longer report ROM sales separately after Q3.
- The firm reported ROM revenue fell to about 5 percent of sales from roughly 26 percent a year earlier, a drop it cited when deciding to shift production focus.
- Macronix said limited factory capacity will be moved to NOR chips, which store code for devices, and eMMC chips, which act like embedded flash storage for gadgets.
- Industry analysts note other memory-card makers still supply Nintendo, so the change is unlikely to cause an immediate shortage of Switch or Switch 2 cartridges.
- The move tightens the cartridge supply chain and reduces a public data point on physical production at the same time that Nintendo’s digital sales have been rising, which could raise medium-term risks for physical-game availability.