WD_Black plans to move into mobile after conquering Xbox with C50 Expansion Card

Western Digital's gaming brand has told T3 that it plans to develop products for mobile gaming "in the future". 

We met with the company's senior product marketing manager for Europe, Ruben Dennenwaldt, during Gamescom 2023 in Germany who explained to us that, while Western Digital and, specifically, its SanDisk offshoot supply capable storage for mobile gaming use, there will also be something coming from WD_Black itself.

"We have officially licensed products from Nintendo Switch, so you could argue that it would make sense to have them under the WD_Black brand," he said.

"But we started this before we had WD_Black and they do really well in the marketplace, so we decided to keep them where they are because that's really working.

"But will there be mobile oriented WD_Black products in the future? I can't disclose... but yes, there will be. Stay tuned."

The WD_Black brand was originally formed to create storage solutions for gamers that both perform well and look good. The metal casing on many of the products helps with heat dissipation, but it also gives the cards and external drives a distinctive aesthetic.

"The look and feel of a product is always quite important," explained Dennenwaldt.

"We try to design WD_Black products in a way that the are nice looking. Look at the metal cover, apart from the nice form factor, it just feels nice. And, because it's metal, it helps with heat dissipation too.

"It's all those small things we pay attention to. And how a product looks and feels are important to gamers."

While the company executive couldn't reveal any more about its future product roadmap, I think we take it as read that there'll be some form of metal construction involved in potential mobile accessories. And, they'll be in black.

The recently-released WD_Black C50 Expansion Card for Xbox Series X/S is a great example of this. It's small, lives around the back of the console, so will hardly ever be seen, yet it feels nice in the hand and has a sleeker look than the rival Seagate equivalent.

In that regard, we fully expect mobile devices to follow suit – even if you never actually see then outside of a phone. At least you know they look their best.