If you head onto the Switch eShop now, chances are you probably won’t have a good time. Unless you go into it knowing what you want to buy ahead of time, the significant slowdown and copious shovelware making up the majority of the ‘Recent Releases’ section will likely be enough to scare you off long before you discover anything worth purchasing.
There are a lot of games on the eShop in 2024; far more than we’re comfortable with, frankly. It might be difficult to imagine now, but when the Switch launched in 2017 with little more than Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Fast RMX, Snipperclips, 1-2 Switch, and a handful of other software titles, the eShop actually ran pretty smoothly. This, coupled with its simplistic design, actually made the user experience reasonably pleasant. Sure, it might have lacked the personality of the Wii U and 3DS eShops, but it worked, and that’s really all that matters.
Fast forward seven years and it’s a very different story. The eShop runs at a snail’s pace and the few tabs available via the main interface are simply not enough to allow for an efficient and comfortable browsing experience. As an experiment, go ahead and try to locate Endless Ocean Luminous without directly searching for it. In our experience with the UK eShop, the game doesn’t show up in the ‘Discover’ section, it’s not in the charts, it’s not discounted, and so our only option is to continue scrolling through the ‘Recent Releases’ section, waiting for each game’s key art to load as we make our way further through the sludge.
Truth be told, we didn’t find it in the end. A bit more patience and we probably would have got there eventually, but gosh, we’ve got better things to do with our time. It’s safe to say that the eShop’s biggest issue right now is that it’s simply buckling under the weight of its vast library. We’re going to assume that the Switch 2 will likely resolve this issue when it eventually launches (and presuming it’s also fully backwards compatible), but we want to dive deep into the eShop and look at what Nintendo can do to improve the digital storefront.
Let’s take a look…
Filters
This is the big one. At the moment, you can only apply a filter to the ‘Current Offers’ section of the eShop, and it’s not the most comprehensive tool imaginable either; you can filter by software or DLC, price range, genre, and age rating. And that's it.
Ideally, we’d like to see a filter tool applied to all major segments of the eShop, including ‘Recent Releases’ and ‘Coming Soon’. Not only that but it needs to be fleshed out to include more options. Off the top of our heads, we’re thinking ‘release year’, ‘oldest to newest’, ‘number of players’, 'free/paid', and even ‘accessibility’ (pausable, adjustable difficulty, etc).
Perhaps the most important filter for us, however, would be ‘publisher’. Imagine if you could browse the list of newest releases but keep it limited to the likes of Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Atlus, and Capcom? Well, who you choose to view is entirely up to you, but what we’re really trying to say is that we’d love a way to sack off the dirge of shovelware publishers currently clogging up the eShop feed. If Nintendo won’t get rid of them, then at least give us an option to block them from view.