Because at some point they'll have to. Other devices which need high-speed removable storage have become increasingly niche, so there's never going to be another mass-market format unless Nintendo spearheads it. If they don't do it with Switch 2, they'll just have to do it with Switch 3. Even on Switch 2, there's
lots of data to suggest that UFS 2 is the baseline option for storage in a new Switch, and unless they intentionally hobble performance by restricting operation to a single lane,
that would mean at least 850MB/s sequential read speeds. UHS-II cards, then, would be substantially slower than internal storage in the worst case scenario, so restricting themselves to mass-market standards would significantly restrict performance today, if you even consider UHS-II mass-market.
Another reason to think they might is that they (sort of) did it before with a fancy new format called the SD card. Back in 2000, when the Gamecube was revealed, Nintendo announced that they would release a memory card adapter that would allow people to use SD cards with the system. The Gamecube was one of the first devices announced to support SD cards in any way, and as far as I can tell cameras using the cards didn't appear until
late 2001, with major brands taking a long time to adopt the format (eg Canon not supporting it until
2005). Ultimately the SD card adapter was delayed to 2003, and ended up only being released in Japan, and
only supporting two games.
Of course the Nintendo of today is very different to the one of 23 years ago, but I think it's an interesting reminder that Nintendo's support for the SD card format itself started long before it became a mass-market standard.
Whether other manufacturers change standard doesn't really matter to Nintendo. For the past few years the Switch has outsold the entire camera industry by 2 to 3 times, and the proportion of those camera sales which support CFexpress is likely less than 10%. It's entirely possible that Nintendo could overtake the entire current CFexpress install base on launch day.
Speaking of which, CFexpress, despite being a very niche format, has a pretty healthy number of manufacturers.
A quick look on B&H shows 15 different brands for CFexpress Type B, so I'd be very surprised if a format backed by Nintendo, and used in a device that's outselling the entire camera industry two-fold on an off-year, would only end up with one vendor.
Besides, Nintendo can just use CFexpress. Type A is small, relatively low power (reported max 1.7W from manufacturers, compared to 1.62W max for UFS cards, although I'd expect UFS cards to be lower in real-world use), and the specification could be relatively trivially updated to support PCIe 4.0 for sequential speeds of up to 1.7GB/s if they needed it. It's also very cheap for Nintendo to add a reader for, given they already have the PCIe lanes. Current CFexpress cards are absurdly expensive, but this is more to do with the extremely small current market of professionals than the standard itself (which is basically an M2 drive in a plastic case). Delkin introduced a new CFexpress card recently
with a 75% off launch sale, which shows the kind of margins they're working with.
" . It's been a long time since I played a football game. The only football game I owned is the one made by Human in the 90s, yeah that game sucks due to how the camera is set up.
