It’s to prevent warez rips as well, though. Performance of the SD card can be easily worked around; blocking the non-preservation segment community that just wants to download and play Switch games without paying for them — the majority of which don’t care about historical preservation or speedrunning — is made much easier by simply not loading new games from SD cards at all.
If stopping piracy was the main motivation for this change then all games would ship on GameKey carts, but they are still offering real carts to publishers who are willing to pay extra for the flash.
It's rare for physical media to be the weak link in console DRM nowadays, when piracy does happen it's nearly always enabled by a full system jailbreak at which point you can just as easily pirate digital games.
It's up to the publisher how much DRM they want. Just as publishers choose whether or not their game on Steam uses DRM, publishers for Switch 2 decide whether their game will use GameKey or not.
It’s not all or nothing. They made ripping of the most valuable games more difficult in exchange for lower prices for publishers, a win-win scenario for their platform, and those few who will insist on having a no-download experience can pay extra to do so. Obviously platform compromises will continue to make ripping possible, but this isn’t about all or nothing prevention, it’s about ratcheting up the difficulty level.
There's basically no chance that this scheme will prevent piracy.
Once again the pirates will have the superior product and paying customers will be screwed over.
