Thanks for the insight! Nintendo would certainly be big enough to convince someone to invest into manufacturing such cards I guess. Although wouldn't that lead to a situation similar to the PS Vita where you had to buy expensive proprietary memory cards
?
No, but also yes, but also no.
No, because the SD Express MicroSD (truly the worst name) is an open standard, so anyone could make them, without having to talk to Nintendo. Whoever Samsung's customer is, there is just enough market out there for the cards that they're making a public announcement. That could help drive down costs.
Yes, because Nintendo isn't
that big. Assuming half of people buy MicroSD Express cards for their Switch, that's 5-10 million a year in sales, but MicroSD cards themselves, overall, much larger market. So yeah, you'll probably end up paying a premium price for the extra speed that the cards offer.
No, again, because one of the advantages of the Express standard is you can use your existing MicroSD cards in the same slot. Express cards are just faster. Assuming that most games don't
require the super fast speeds to work, you should be able to reuse whatever card you're currently using.
The reason to offer something like this is because Nintendo wants game developers to be able to use Super Fast Storage. Nintendo can guarantee the onboard storage is fast, they can make cartridges fast, but there wasn't a good solution to "fast expansion storage" that would work in a handheld.
Resurrecting an old, but failed, standard that is backwards compatible with the old system is probably the best bet