Topic: What I find most annoying about the eShop

Is that there seems to be some arbitrary, heavily enforced law that every game on it needs to have a screenshot of the menu screen. What purpose does this serve? It's like pre-rendered trailers. It does nothing but mean there's one less screenshot displaying actual gameplay (although it is nice when identifying shovelware, which tend to have mediocrity spread all throughout the game, including the title screen)

You're trying to tell me that you don't actually go online to find out more about a game? You rely solely on the eShop screenshots?

I'm not trying to tell you that at all. (Although I've seen and played an absolute buttload of non-AAA titles in my time, both PC and 3DS/DSi shovelware, so I'm semi-able to very rapidly identify particular qualities of a game by simply its screenshots alone. They are the first things I look at, because descriptions, especially the eShop ones, begin to all blur together in meaning once you've read enough of them)

If you first see a game on the eShop, which is normally the case unless you follow Nintendo news sites avidly, the order you will most likely see its features are:

1. eShop Cover Art, Icon Art, & Title, then the Price and Rating
2. Trailer/Demo (Not always though. Not all games have trailers or demos, and loading them does take time and depending on the person you might not be interested in watching the trailer, or playing a 10-30 minute demo, of every game you open the store page for. I for one generally don't look at the trailer until I am strongly interested in the game, and downloading a demo is basically a "I'll check it out some other time" flag)
3. Description (short version), along with the rest of the description or the Screenshots, depending on if you click the "read more" button or not
4. Genres, publishers, categories

This is the extent of the information the store page provides: i.e. fairly lackluster, so every bit is valuable if you want to grab a customer early. (and not have to force them through the rigmarole of looking up your game on a different piece of hardware just to identify if a game is worth purchasing)

I'm not saying that customers should purchase games using the eShop description alone, I'm saying that the distributor should get the customers the most interested as possible using what little space they have to advertise their game. Seeing a menu screenshot simply doesn't get me excited at all, and often very glaringly showcases the amateur programming behind a game such as when it uses very template-looking gui elements, or when it's simply a copy+paste like is evident with the G.G game series.

Publishers get to choose the screenshots, and some of them probably find their menus to be one of the more grabbing parts, maybe they have better artwork on the menu than in game or something. But I agree with @Geonjaha you should always use multiple sources to decide to buy a game, not just their marketing.

IIRC, it's not some of them. It's all of them. This is what I was drawing attention to.

It's bad shopping practice to purchase items based on their marketing alone.
It's bad marketing to provide shoppers with useless, uninteresting advertising that forces them to look elsewhere for information.

I know it's me being very pedantic, but If you're going to bore me by showing me the digital box a game comes in instead of selling me the product, why should I bother going out of my way looking at more information about a game? There's plenty of stuff on the eShop, I'll just move along to the next title. That's my thinking.

I just went on the eShop and selected LBX, 1 screenshot of customization, 1 screenshot of what looks like a anime clip, and 1 screenshot of battling.

EDIT: Showing the Menu is a quick and easy way to show customers what features a game might have. It isn't useless information.

EDIT2: Also Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate doesn't show Menus in its screenshots

I've seen some screenshots showing the title screen with the "Press Start" or its equivalent on the bottom screen. Justify that

Yes, I don't think the shelf-release titles do it often. It's mostly downloadable titles that are massive culprits of this.
MH4U doesn't need screenshots to say it's a good game LBX I'm dying to get because I was a massive fan of Custom Robo on the DS.

Agreed - it's absolutely demential to have a useless menu screenshot when you are limited to only three pictures.
And even if you could include 700 pictures, the menu shouldn't be in any of these. It's like trying to sell you a house by showing you the keys. It's not pedantic, it's perfectly legit complaint.
The pictures should show the action and the overall feel of the game. None of these can be seen in a screenshot that looks like three buttons with Arcade / Options / Credits written on.

I think you are Blathering too much about this

That's what you find most annoying and not the fact that the eShop lacks an option to gift games?

@I-U:
It is annoying, yes, but that's why gift cards exist, I guess. And worrying about not being able to gift games would imply I have friends

Ah, so I'm not being a Comb McNitpicker.

Here we go, wording it properly this time:

I am not one to buy games based on what's in their screenshots. What I do is not buy games based on what's in their screenshots.

When you're flicking through the shovelware on the eShop, and I'm pretty sure you all know that there's a lot of it, there simply isn't enough interest in looking up reviews for every single one. Heck, I even get bored halfway through the description, since most of them are generic and non-gameplay related story ramblings, in games that often have very weak or no story focus. So the first thing I always do after opening a game's page is look at the screenshots. If it doesn't look half-terrible, I skim the description, check if it's multiplayer, look at what genres it belongs to, then if it still interests me, I read the full description and then watch the trailer. If at any point it loses me, I check the "people also bought" (because there are generally good games in there) and then move on to the next game.

Interesting topic. While the eShop has 101 fundamental design flaws I never looked into the screenshot issue but it certainly makes sense now that it's been mentioned. As someone who works in design, there are a lot of decisions that just don't make sense within the eShop.

If something as simple as a screenshot isn't generating my interest in a game, if it isn't making me think that the game looks interesting/fun/exciting to play and thus convincing me to purchase it, then it's failed at the most basic level. In addition to the near useless title screens, I've also seen some gameplay screenshots that look about as exciting as watching paint dry too.

Oh? Like what?

Isn't that just the online equivalent of looking at the back of the box and going: "yeah this looks like fun" (a practice that has served me well 97% of the time.)

From the top of my head some issues are:

Upon entering the wrong password for payment, users are still allowed to proceed for two steps towards purchase before receiving an error message. When the correction is then made, users are 'put back' two steps to repeat the process.

Amount of 'clicks' required to access content. The general rule is that users on a PC with a mouse will tend to accept four to five 'clicks' to reach what they want, users with a television remote or using a gamepad tend to be less due to ease of use. In fairness a lot of Japanese companies struggle with this in their product but Nintendo in particular require confirmation or 'clicks' for almost everything. It takes at least 6 clicks to play a demo from the 3DS eShop, not including searching for them and that pointless present feature. Delaying access to games (in particular on a mobile device) is inefficient.

Poor layout (3DS eShop) means that a lot of games are buried behind excessive menu screens/update patches/demos. If I search for "Zelda" (for example) I'm presented with three videos and an update patch for Majora Mask on the first screen, an actual game on the second screen, and the other games on the second page. I can filter the search myself but that goes against the idea of mobile gaming (i.e. quick access for those on the go). Why aren't I presented with the games first by default? Why am I shown any update patches for games I've not played (no save files)?

The B button seems to allow users to exit some screens, but not others (when viewing screenshots for example) so there isn't a consistent use. Again with a mobile device, if I need to take my fingers away from holding it, to press a button somewhere else (in this case my left hand moves to press the touch screen) that runs the risk of dropping.

I admit, these may seem a bit pedantic but as a designer, once you start noticing them you can't help but wonder why someone thought they were a good idea in the first place.

Eh, I wanted to buy Mighty Gunvolt yesterday - went to the download page and sure enough that's the first screenshot. Yeah, I know it's Mighty Gunvolt - cheers. Another annoyance is with DSiWare games - you can't enlarge the pictures.
Yes you could go online and watch screenshots, trailers, reviews etcetera, but in theory you shouldn't need to.
Also, since all Nintendo consoles have touch technology now, I don't understand why they wouldn't allow users to COMMENT on the games they have purchased, like on iPhone or Amazon. I find user reviews more helpful than professional reviews. And yeah in theory you can read people' impressions on Miiverse but it's just too time consuming to go through millions of silly posts just to find an onest thought. Reviews is something Nintendo needs to have on their next machine.

But I would forgive every flaw mentioned in this thread had the digital store many games worth getting, but VC aside, the 3DS eShop is surprisingly empty...

Oh right, and also, you are not told how many blocks you need for a game if you don't have the funds to purchase it. You have to add funds, tap the purchase button, then find out you need to exit the eShop to delete some stuff (or worse, buy a new SD card) before loading eShop back up again to purchase the game. Also yeah: not allowing you to purchase a game when you don't have enough space? What if there's a sale on, and you want to buy the game but not play it right away? Why is there no option to "not download" a game? You have to do the workaround where you click "download later", go back to your home screen, then hit the stop command on the download. And even this doesn't work if you already have 10 downloads queued. You just have to "arrange" a disconnect so the game fails to download.

Ah yes. I tried searching "Smash". Trailers galore.

Additionally, on the NA eShop, searching tags is horrendous.

For me, it is the fact that I have to hunt down the prepaid cards if I want to buy something. At least, Walmart was selling them in digital format last time I checked. Seriously, it is that hard to not ignore almost all Latin America?

I love the Eshop but there is one thing that bothers me and I'm not even into it all that much. But the lack of VC on 3DS and Wii-U. They have been nuts in my opinion not to be flooding the VC for people who have been waiting for that. I was hoping for PCEngine games on the 3DS. I doubt that will happen now with Konami going the way of the Dodo. What a shame great games will be lost now. Konami has let that happen.

It could be like the DSi shop.

Two or three super tiny screenshots you can't enlarge.