The holiday season is almost here and Nintendo is partnering up with Western Digital for licensed SD Cards this fall. It's not uncommon for companies to release their own memory cards and hard drives. Microsoft and Sony also work with other companies to have SSDs and hard drives available for their customers. Why might Nintendo want to make an SD card? For starters, they could make sure people purchase the right SD card for their Switch. It may not be the best on the market but if it's from Nintendo people will most likely buy it. Nintendo also gets a share of the revenue because of this new partnership, but right now there's no confirmed price point for the SD cards.
What does this mean moving forward?
Nintendo also announced that "NBA 2K18" needs an internet download and SD card to play it. This might mean that future games could require you to have an SD card to play them. This feature is already present on the Xbox One and PS4 consoles, more demanding games for the Switch might need more MB to compensate. Nintendo also added that games with additional content can be downloaded partially and players can still play the full game. The SD cards that are available for purchase are 64GB and 128GB versions. The 64GB features a picture of Link, and the 128GB version features a picture of Mario in his racing kart. Something to keep in mind is that you can still purchase other SD cards that are compatible with the Switch.
This is Nintendo's official version so if it ends up being too expensive you can buy another variant.
Why buy an SD card if you have to install data anyway?
There is only so much the internal hardware can take before it needs to outsource to another memory device. Back in the day, we could have all our data on disks because we didn't push the boundaries as much.
Even on consoles like the original PlayStation, you needed a memory card for your saved data so this concept isn't as arbitrary as it might seem.
On consoles now, your saved data can be retrieved from the console's cloud systems. But even so, you need an SD card or hard drive for updates and DLC available for every game you play.
If you plan on owning a lot of games for your Switch you might need an SD card at some point. However, not all games will require you to install extra data onto an SD card so it depends on what games you want. If you decide to go all digital, think about how many games you're going to buy this year and next year and buy the right SD card. You can always delete the games you don't play anymore or archive them.
