
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.
Specific Sale Pages

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

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

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

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)
- Filters
- Specific Sale Pages
- Curated Home Page
- Baskets
- Demo Page
- Other (comment!)
Comments 74
Honestly I'd just completely redesign the thing from the ground up. Don't think changing one or two things would be enough to actually fix it.
This isn’t really about the design of the eShop itself, and it’s also highly unlikely they’ll ever change this, but it’d be great if they had some sort of built-in refund system like Steam does, instead of having to jump through a bunch of legal hoops to maybe get one
What I really want is a better way to find sales. There should be a page for Nintendo published games on sale and a wish list that gives you notifications when a game there goes on sale. That’s all I really want. Oh, and no lag PLEASE
How about speed, getting rid of sketchy (and copyright infringing) games, and music!
Nintendo ought to just hire Michael from DekuDeals to rewrite the eShop. He leans heavily into prebuilt filters, which suits me just fine.
The number one thing for me would be speed. The eShop is SO SLOW. Forget scrolling past the first few pages. I end up using the website from my phone instead.
Most indie devs say that the first few days on the eShop is the only time that matters, because very soon afterwards the sales go to near zero without some massive discount. I attribute it to the eShop being so painful to scroll through that nobody does it.
The Switch news feed has frequent articles that are effectively curated lists of recommended games with a variety of criteria. The store should have a section that allows looking at these various 'curated lists' using news feed 'voting' data to determine which ones show up.
2nd, the wishlist has a 400 titles cap - once expanded from 100. Its time to expand the cap again...
It would be great if it could just function. But all of these would be pluses
@shauntu Or even better separate wish lists
I go to the Store while in handheld mode. It is excruciatingly slow to scroll through games, especially the area with the games on sale. It freezes every so often to load up the pages and game icons. I tried this in different Wi-Fi places and get the same issue at all locations. should not be this slow. In my mind, this needs to be fixed asap. I can only speak for handheld as I don't play docked.
Voting in order for (by the way, interesting that voting works like that this time):
Some nice Wii/DS background shopping music.
I don't have my Switch with me but I thought there was a page for Games With Demos, either under your account or from one of the main pages. Did they remove it?
It is frustrating especially when some things the Nintendo website (in NA) actually does. Like specific sale pages.
Honestly I use DekuDeals a lot for all three console platforms to find stuff out rather than go to their console or web stores.
Background music, like in the 3DS/Wii days, would make the slow scrolling more tolerable.
I really want the rating system back. Just a five star score and the number of reviews is the perfect amount of information.
How about simply not flooding all screens with the vast amount of dog-poo shovelware items on there
A basket, improved filters, ratings , and a refund system similar to Steam’s.
Why did Nintendo not bring back the star ratings from the 3DS eShop? It felt so good to give my official ratings for a game as well as the ratings allowing more quality games to stand out. There were themed pages on 3DS, too. More filters and background music would also be great.
Just make it similar to the 3DS eShop, essentially!
There needs to be music, it feels like I'm shopping in an abandoned supermarket
I'd just like the junk to be completely omitted out of the eShop by quality checkers and more precise filters. Take filtering RPGs on sale for example. RPG is getting too vague these days as a catch all term, but those nauseating shovelware hentai games keep popping up... Like I'm looking for something similar to Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest, Pokemon, etc, not action adventure games or shovelware like the blatant plagiarism that is Call of Honour Duty of Warfare.
That hentai stuff though is just embarrassing, cos I'm just peacefully browsing for my next lvl up dopamine rush and the wife sees there's a hentai game on my screen: "Oh... Uh, hey hon! Er, Final Fantasy X is on sale!" "Oh, you're about to be my X! Perv!" 🫣
Try searching for visual novels without actually knowing what the titles are called. I just wanted to browse them to see what took my fancy, instead i just headed to reddit for a list of highest rated ones and had to search each and every one by name to see if they looked like my bag or not. Most are advertised as "adventure"
There is a "Games with Demos" filter available on the Search/Browse Tab.
Also some of the requested Filters could be setup through the search browse page as well, when combined with the sorting function. More filter options would be appreciated though.
One feature I would like is the ability to search for DLC of for base games I own.
My biggest gripe is that its so laggy. Fix that and i dont need much of anything else.
Filters targeting discount ranges would be nice. Oftentimes the $3 mobile trash is marked down 33% so that it sits right on the top of the $1.99 floor cap of the North America eShop pricing. Targeting a higher discount point (50% or higher) would help separate the wheat from the chaff.
It's such a lackluster experience that I avoid it entirely
god baskets would make the world perfect
Not only is "Games with Demos" one of the key search filters available, but there is also a "games with demos" listing on the "Featured" page. They have definitely done a good job with that one, so I'm not sure what this article is talking about.
Now Steam on the other hand really needs to get their act together with demos. When I have a ton of games on my wishlist, I should easily be able to filter out which ones have demos available, but there isn't a way to do that, even though people have asked for that function for years. On top of that, some Steam games have separate listings for the game and the demo, while for others it's unified. And some games have the demo button listed at the top of the game page, while others you have to scroll further down. It's really a mess.
The Switch eShop won't exist anymore in a few years. So who cares? I would suggest to bring back Virtual Console to buy your games and play them anytime you want for as long as you have your console. Not being afraid of servers shutting down or paying monthly for subscription services that cut you out and change whenever they want.
I tried voting all of them for baskets, but @NintendoLife didn't let me.
@PikminMarioKirby I agree with every point except music. Nintendo's eshop music has never been good or enjoyable enough to make up of how much extra loading time is required. With the Switch's eshop already running slow, I'd vote no music right now. Even if music is added without slowdown, I'd want an option to mute it for those of us who don't want to hear it.
Not having take an age to load anything would be nice but yeah it needs all of the above as it's a pretty miserable experience at the moment.
Granted the Wii Shop had way less games but it was a significantly better experience than the mess that's the eshop, so much so that I barely ever browse it.
That said, a shopping basket is a top priority then they need to curate or control what games are on sale and sort out the home page so that it can't be abused by trash games
@Justaguest
It’s remarkable that they have never tried to address the lag considering they designed Switch OS to be fast and snappy, the lag on the shop is almost as worse as what happened to the PS3’s store in 2012 when its interface was completely changed and would lag down to running in single digit frame rates.
Not sure if it's been mentioned but how about some user reviews of games?
Hopefully the switch 2 will have a microphone and some Alexa type thing, to make it slightly easier
Folks asking about eShop's slowness/lagginess should know the reason it is this way is intentional. They are using a CPU-heavy security layer, which as far as I'm aware, does not work with JIT compiling. It's why it is somewhat slow when no game is loading (as it uses the 3 CPU game cores), but extremely slow when a game is loaded (as it uses the same core tge OS uses).
If there's one thing I've learned about filters, is that you can never have enough filters. As far as the shopping cart, even if they don't have a cart per se, it would be great to multi-select purchases or something to that effect, because as it is, you can only multi-select purchases when they're DLC. Lastly even though they added a filter for demos there's one problem-- if a demo is released for a game well after the game itself has been released, then the demo section will still leave that game in the order of when the game was released, so you literally would never know that a game that has already been released has a demo for you to try unless you dug all the way deep enough into the demos to "happen" to find out. I don't know how many times I came across a game I might have waitlisted and I found out, "oh it has a demo, let me get on that." I'm sure there's countless others that have game demos that I have no clue about.
@Olliemar28 wrote:
Um... This option is available via the "Price Range tab in filters.
Make the wishlist 500 entries and fix the load times. That’s all I need. I prefer the layout of the eshop over sony and MA’s storefronts. Imo all 3 shops suck in some way so it is what it is.
USER RATINGS ON GAMES!!
I also agree that the eShop is way too slow, especially when trying to load a new page.
A few? Yeesh, the whole thing needs a complete overhaul
I mean....number one is clearly just to make the eshop not the slowest laggiest thing in existence. I quite like the 'new this week' and demos pages personally, but even those are laggy.
For number two, definitely better filters. And better discoverability overall.
The lack of a shopping cart is stupid, but I think it helps me fight evil urges to buy everything sometimes. 😅
They should allow user review scores for games after if has been played for a couple of hours.
Sorting searches by review score would quickly weed out the rubbish.
Can I vote for filters, filters and more filters?
Most of my game searches for the purpose of discovering new games are done on other sites, like Metacritic and Deku Deals, precisely because they've got better filtering.
I'd say one thing they could do to improve performance would be to remove infinite scrolling. The eShop really starts to struggle when you're so far down search results, the all games on sale page or some publisher pages for example.
When you're so far down and then go to a game page and then go back it does remember where you are, however it has to hold the whole list in memory. Couple that with the feature when you've highlighted a game and it starts cycling through the screenshots for that game, there's a lot there in memory which doesn't need to be there.
The switch browser engine clearly has been given the bare minimum in terms system resources in order to ensure game performance isn't impacted. However it doesn't seem to be allowed to use more resources if a game isn't running.
Being able to gift games would be cool
Keyword Blocks.
I'm pretty sure every Switch-owning parent is dreading the day that Little Johnny and/or Maisie ask the near-inevitable question 'Daddy, what's Hentai mean?' For all such content on the eShop barely deserves the term, putting it Out There for the young'uns to spot and subsequently go a-googling for is prrrrrobably not the greatest idea.
It’s ironic that for all the stability and bad words list updates we have downloaded over the years, Hentai has been one of the most watered-down terms on the eShop. And yet it has been allowed to fly under the radar and infest it with mild abandon, its true meaning hiding in the shadows of the real world and the rest of the intermabob. Waiting for the unsuspecting to trip over its pulchritudinous ways.
So that would be my pitch - let users block certain terms when found in keywords, titles and yes, devs & publishers. Anything you don't want [you and your younglings] to see, you [and they] don't see. MidnightWorks and their shonk-ass contemporaries would get their collective asses stomped before the hat even thought about dropping.
Oh yes - and how about stop blocking my SODDING DEBIT CARD just because I use a VPN. No other bugger at all has issues with me ordering stuff to be delivered in the UK when my IP looks like I'm in Norway - it's literally just Nintendo, and they've done it three times now.
“Better with wii shop music” is too a broad and general improvement for eg my grans funeral would have been vastly improved had they included wii shop music. Also deku deals does such a good job that a lot of these things are covered here. Check out switch stars youtube for some improvement ideas https://youtu.be/8yqDwTRTlyU?si=T-4tSKpMzioYAhSs
@shauntu That's quite an impressive idea.
@Coffeemonstah
🤣If you're using the eShop, just what do you need delivered?
@Lightsiyd No, I mean every other website I order stuff on. None of them have any problems with me doing so while using a VPN. Only Nintendo has ever blocked my card details - and this has to be the reason. My card works fine literally everywhere else while I'm going through another 30-day soft-ban on the eShop. They've nerfed my PayPal each time too, and are once again the only place it gets blocked.
They're fine and freakin' dandy with me getting a voucher code, though.
if only there was a way to find demos...love that the box marked "demos" isn't enough.
if only there was a way to search by developer...like clicking on their name...oh wait you can.
if only there was a way to search by genre...are you catching a theme in these answers?
what about price ranges...yep that's there too.
As others have mentioned, it's the unbelievable sluggishness that keeps me from using the eshop. When I want to browse, I use Dekudeals.
Worst digital game store ever. Period!
@Coffeemonstah That must be quite frustrating. you must have tried contacting them regarding the issue, right? What's their excuse?
@Lightsiyd Oh, they don’t even have one. They’ve actually said they can’t do a single thing about it. More likely they can’t be arsed.
I can almost hear them stifling that most infuriating of phrases, It Is What It Is.
I would like to be able to search the DLC for games that I own.
@Coffeemonstah That's quite rough bro. I would have ditched the Switch at that point. How do you manage?
The ability to hide game types. I'm never buying a hentai girls puzzle game, why do I have to scroll through hundreds of them?
Also I wish you could go to release years and sort by popularity, I have had a switch from day one but a lot of people haven't and only really get current top lists or new releases.
@Lightsiyd For a kickoff, I have multiple backlogs you could measure punt returns with. Physical and digital. And Steam. And my emulation gear. So I chip away at one of them.
My non-Nintendo stuff topped out at PS3 & 360. Just not enough stuff I wanted to play on anything later to warrant buying any of them - but the Switch more than made up for that. Far and away my biggest single-format collection, and I’ve been at this a while.
You forgot to mention rating system?
Also - you can search by publisher, i think, if you put the vendor name in the search bar. Worst case scenario, if you know a game by the publisher, you can click on publisher name on the game page.
here some features i want Nintendo to add on the eShop:
filters for games
a option to rate games or recomend them to friends
a basket or multibuy option
a wishlist option
While the eshop ist definitely slow, it never bothered me, because I don't browse digital stores. I search for games I actually want, not those that are presented to me. And to broaden my horizon I got news sites like nintendolife. Furthermore, how are people still not exclusively using dekudeals.com is beyond me.
They need to seriously overhaul the ui focusing on performance and readability. Tile view is completely useless as titles often use fonts that are illegible. Something as simple as title right below the tile would be a massive improvement so we wouldn't have to wait for image to load to see what it is.
My "dream" eshop would basically be deku deals app on switch. I literally never open eshop anymore. I just click on what I want on deku, buy through website and game downloads automatically next time I turn on my console.
There are indeed fundamental architecture limitations that @Discostew mentioned, so there's not much they can do to improve things, even if they wanted to.
That said, I feel that that there's no real incentive for Nintendo to improve the e-shop experience either. They know how important retail presence is, so digital continues to play second fiddle to physical. I don't expect that to change in next gen either. The major first-party titles are still easy to find.
Second, the big sale events are mostly for third-party and indies, as first-party titles rarely have more than 33% discount. During a sale, people are more willing to put up with a janky experience. Or just use DekuDeals.
Honestly the thing that would improve the eShop the most would be removing certain publishers.
The reason you can’t find Endless Ocean is because you have to scroll past hundreds of ‘special edition’, ‘cool edition’, ‘great edition’ from the likes of Red Deer Games. All the exact same game but with a tiny bit of DLC bundled or not. And all those low rent mobile ports can go. Not to mention the new slew of AI generated and hentai games.
It’s all trash and it all needs to go.
Under filters, they do already have price range listed as an option to choose between free/paid under Search, Other Search Filters. You can also search by publisher as well, you just have to type the name of the game and then click on publisher and it will show all the games by that publisher.
Also there is a already a demo section, it's the top option, search, "Games with Demos", and there are 861. Seems odd that there's an article about the eshop without mentioning any of this.
1- Fixing the languages list since it is one of the basics. The current languages list is simply stupid, it only shows the languages supported by the Switch OS. If the game supports 10 languages and the system only supports 5, the supported language in the eShop list will include only 5. What about the others? Well, buy the game to know if your language is supported And YouTube people are not helping, 90% of them either don't check the settings or they check every single option in the settings and once they reach the languages list they just skip (for some reason). I understand that this problem might be irrelevant for you since most of you speak one of the languages supported by Nintendo, but there are thousands of people around the world been struggling for years because of this weird decision by Nintendo to not include all the languages supported by the game (+ YouTubers maybe not be aware of this problem since nobody talking about it).
2- Fixing their laggy eShop.
3- Baskets.
Not a huge thing, but I’d like to hide games on the eshop that I have already purchased
The Wii eshop had a list of publishers that have published games on the eshop that you can see the rest of their games on their page. The Switch has the same list of games by publisher, but you can’t just go to that publishers page. You have to find a game they published first to then go to that publishers page.
Filters so I can just block out all the hentai & shovelware... & add a ratings system like how the Wii U & 3DS had. So I can just one star the shovelware.
How many people realize that there is indeed a way to search by demos?
the only way i can browse the eshop is by using dekudeals, since afaik it recently started filtering out the shovelware publishers (and always sorted by popularity so those were never a huge issue). so yeah, being able to mute certain publishers so youd never see their games would be a game changer, though nintendo really just needs to bring back quality control. ban any generative ai "games" and all that softcore porn etc.
imo bundles should absolutely not be treated as new games, they should only show up on any applicable games pages, that way shovelware publishers like red deer games wouldnt be able to release 50 deluxe/ultra/mega editions every few days to stay at the top of the eshop.
and yeah, an actual refund option. theres an urban legend that nintendo allows returns if you phone them, but its only one return per person or something. i shouldnt have to go through all that!! i bought a game a few months ago and the eshop listing uses screenshots from another platform, the actual game runs and looks atrocious and i cant return it. this experience just made me super distrustful of the eshop and id much rather buy something on steam since i know i can return it if its falsely advertised. plus, tracking the number of refunds compared to the number of purchases so that if a games returned way more than is expected, nintendo could review the eshop page for any falsehoods
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