This is not going to be much of an issue... the game cards were easily the best option available for the switch, and as the article says the prices have been plummeting for these over the past few years.

I questioned whether this might be why I can't find physical releases for a few of those games in the eshops, but that should cease to be an issue as time goes on.

We really should just be grateful that we have physical options, as lord knows all three major console companies have been trying to ease us into digital only for ages now. With a physical release you can own it forever, sell it if you get bored, and buy a cheap used copy later on in the future; digital's price is not subject to supply and demand, can't be resold or collected, and occupy ever increasing amounts of hard drive space as devs seem to become less concerned with optimizing their games and routinely release patches ~33% the size of their original games.

While I've caved on my PC and gone fully digital with Steam, I'm still holding out on consoles lol

No. A 32 GB Switch cart costs the same as a BD to produce. This was announced by macronix over a year ago.

I called BS. The 3DS and the Vita also used game carts. Vita at least got several games that were ports of PS3, like Sly Cooper. The Vita version was 40 bucks while the home console one was 60. Of course, I may be wrong since Vita cards were 4GB tops while Switch can have 32GB ones.

Off-topic: Also, I don't get why everyone is saying that Nintendo "went back to cartridges" and such. They used those on all their portables. 3DS used them, come on!

No way does it cost $2 to press a blu-ray disc in large quantities. In 2009 it was already down to $1.87 for a small run of 5000. http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=2725
Single layer 5000 units today $0.75 http://www.quickturnduplication.com/html/blu-ray-duplication-prices.php
No doubt Nintendo can get that unit price down a lot further for a milltion copies of Zelda...

There's no doubt it costs more to produce a cartridge, much more complex. To compare to a sd-card replication service http://www.discburn.com/html/flash-memory-card-pricing.php starting from $15 per 4GB card.

Of course digital prices are also subject to supply and demand. Otherwise we wouldn't see any sales with 20%, 40%, 50%,  60%... discounts.

All digital stores offer these temporary discounts to reach buyer groups that don't buy game X until it is priced Y $/€/£ or less. Every title is in competition with many other games on the same platform, both with the digital catalogue and with the retail offers.

Those figures are clearly completely wrong. Here in the UK you have retail budget blu-rays that sell for £1. Yes they are terrible movies but they still have to be duplicated so cost can't be any more than about 30c to make. $2.50 is probably the lowest capacity of 1GB with 32GB probably twice that or more and Nintendo will put its own profit on top of that which is what Publishers will have pay.

Cartridges are expensive and that's why Sony and Microsoft use optical discs because once the drive cost has been paid for they can deliver games to retail at very low costs. Nintendo were forced to use cartridges as its a portable system and hence prices are more expensive. There are no surprises here, everyone and their dog knows cartridges will be more expensive. It's the reason the Switch is only fitted with 32GB of flash memory. When we can buy mass produced in their millions 32GB micro sd cards for $1 you'll have a point. Not forgetting Macronix don't even have the economy of scale of SD cards but they only have to design in a single write. However they also have to write the code to the flash memory which is an additional manufacturing process. It's still flash memory in cartridges even though cartridges are now designed to completely disable any writing to this flash memory and use the console's own storage for game saves. 

The point is they're only subject to them if the distributor decides they'd like to increase their sales, and by completely controlling the price of digital offerings they can maintain higher costs than they'd have any hope of doing otherwise; games routinely remain at full or near to full price while their physical copies have plummeted, and the ease of simply downloading leads many to shrug and accept it. I've frequently scrolled through the offerings available on the respective eshops of the three consoles and been shocked to see what they were still demanding for certain games compared to what they're running on eBay, which is one of the reasons I've stopped buying anything digital if a physical copy is available.

I'm aware of the sales as I tend to wait on Steam for their summer sale (prices often drop ~75%), but not everyone does them. Nintendo is easily the worst in this regard.

That they are sold now for £1 doesn't prove that the production costs weren't higher. Were they priced £1 to begin with or are stores/publishers trying to cut their losses and want to free their precious shelf space?

Bullshit, imo.
Wiiu Zelda costs same as switch Zelda, despite being on a disk, shop games cost the same or more despite not using a cart/disk at all.

Games cost what they do because they knew launch was thin and they could both get away with price gouging and still sell a boatload because thin launches get people trigger happy on even shit games.

Obvious, been saying that for a while. Carts are more expensive and take longer to produce. They also discourage overproduction, so expect shortages of carts for games that are being conservative on their sales.