eShop
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life

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.

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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

eShop Filter
Image: Nintendo Life / Nintendo

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.

Specific Sale Pages

Recollection Collection
Image: Nintendo

Xbox’s storefront could do with a bit of TLC, but one thing it does right in our book is that it seperates specific sales into their own sections. If you’re in the UK, you can head into the ‘Deals’ section now and see sections for the ‘Capcom Publisher Sale’, the ‘Ultimate Game Sale Teaser’, and the ‘Publisher Spotlight Series’. It’s a good way to hone in on specific offers if you’re looking for games from a certain publisher, or within a certain genre.

We know sales on the Switch operate in the same way, but if you’re viewing the offers directly from your console, they’re all squished together on one page with no way to differentiate them. Like the ‘recent releases’ page, the ‘current offers’ section is simply an unmanageable list of games that is often over 2000 entries in length.

As we mentioned earlier, there are certain filters available to make this a bit easier, but it would be great to see specific sales by Capcom or Nintendo itself highlighted with its own segment.

Curated Home Page

Home Page
Image: Nintendo Life / Nintendo

You know when you sign up to certain services, you’ll get a brief questionnaire that effectively curates the overall content you see? We reckon something like that would probably benefit the eShop. Now, this could potentially block interesting content from your immediate view, but if the home page were customised to prioritise genres or publishers that you’re genuinely interested in, then it could incentivise more purchases and a better overall experience.

Of course, the eShop as it stands today is pretty simplistic in design, so we imagine some sort of curated home page would require a ridiculous amount of work on Nintendo’s end to get it functioning properly, but from a consumer perspective, we reckon it could work. Heck, if not a whole home page, then perhaps a specific 'For You' section..?

Baskets

Basket
Image: Nintendo Life

For goodness’ sake, how is this not a thing yet? Since the Switch's launch over seven years ago, there is still no basket function on the Switch eShop, meaning you can't purchase more than one game at a time. You have to go through the same frustrating steps every time in order to buy anything.

You could make an argument here that each individual purchase provides you with gold points that can then be used to apply discounts on future purchases. Lumping several games together in one go might negate this benefit to some degree, but at least give us the option. It's particularly egregious when there's a generous sale on with hefty discounts across the board. If we want to buy 10 games in one go and forego food for a week, just let us!

Demos

Dredge Demo
Image: Nintendo Life / Nintendo

Yes, we know demos are a thing for the Switch, we're not suggesting anything to the contrary. What we'd love to see, however, is a section in the eShop dedicated to games with free demos. At the moment, games that include demos have a small, blue box in the top right corner of the key art to indicate this to the user; this is great if you happen to stumble across something unexpected that you might want to try out, but how many demos are just sitting in the eShop languishing because users haven't been able to locate them?

Collating all available demos in one place is a quick and easy win for both Nintendo and the consumer. We get to try out games we might not have considered before, and Nintendo gets to benefit from a ton of potential purchases off the back of demo experiences. We should also clarify here that you can add a 'Search Condition' to ensure only games with demos show up, but this isn't really clear enough for our liking.

So those are our picks for how Nintendo could potentially make the eShop a bit better. We're under no illusion; we know that the current Switch family isn't likely to receive any major eShop update, so it's likely going to fall to the successor to make things right.

Do you agree with our picks? Got something else you'd like to suggest? Feel free to vote in the below poll and let us know which feature you think needs to be implemented and leave a comment to expound on your thoughts.

What features should Nintendo add to improve the eShop? (1,494 votes)

  1. Filters
  2. Specific Sale Pages
  3. Curated Home Page
  4. Baskets
  5. Demo Page
  6. Other (comment!)