They claim there’s a technical reason instead of a financial one:
"Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for. I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion - probably because it was moot.
“I think if we’d designed a game for Switch 2 from the ground up it might have been different. As it was, we’d build a game around the SSDs of the initial target platforms, and then the Switch 2 came along a while later. In this case I think our leadership made the right call.”
No explanation was given as to why they didn’t forgo the key card altogether and just release to the eshop only.
What, are they using OG Switch cards for Switch 2?
No, they have the same form factor but they do have improved read speeds over Switch 1 cards. They’re not as fast as the internal memory or MicroSD express cards though. In Mario Kart, the card takes about 20% longer to load.
I was under the impression that these new cards are as fast as (or near enough) the read speed on internal memory. Apparently that’s not the case.
UMDs ain’t looking so outdated all of a sudden