Macronix, a chip manufacturer, said in its third-quarter earnings report that production of its ROM chips "has reached its end" and that it will begin "gradually decoupling from the game industry," according to Taiwanese news site BigGo Finance. Ars Technica reported the story.
Analyst David Gibson, as cited in the report, describes Macronix as Nintendo's "main memory chip maker" for physical game cartridges. ROM production has shrunk 39 percent over the past year and now makes up 5 percent of Macronix's business, the company said. Macronix attributes the decline to demand for more profitable NOR- and NAND-based memory and eMMCs, which are taking up wafer space. The company's production capacity is 25,000 12-inch wafers a month, and $1.2 billion in planned new capacity will take a year or more to come online.
Nintendo said last month that it has no plans to stop making physical game cartridges in the near future. The report says Nintendo may need to rely on suppliers Rohm and Lapis Semiconductor for its remaining ROM chips, which could raise production costs. The report links those costs to pricing. Earlier this year, Nintendo began charging more for some physical games than their digital equivalents. Separately, the report says Japanese publisher Inin committed to a full Switch cartridge release for R-Type Dimensions III after "two new smaller cartridge [storage capacity] sizes for Nintendo Switch 2" lowered production costs.
Gibson notes that digital software made up 61.5 percent of Nintendo's business in the second calendar quarter of 2026, up slightly from the year before. The report suggests that if digital sales keep rising, lower demand for ROM cartridges could offset the added costs over time.