Topic: Does anyone else feel like the eshop has been resembling the app store?

@Heavyarms55 Don't get me wrong, I have lots of indie games I like. I see indie games and shovelware as being two completely different things. If anything shovelware is just a very particular low effort type of indie game.

I wouldn't say shoveware needs to be made by indie devs. Bigger studios are more than capable of producing it.

Shovelware is usually released by indie developers, but not always.

@JayJ Sometimes perhaps. But plenty of shovelware is the result of big companies just looking for a lazy cash grab.

@Heavyarms55 True, one could easily say Star Wars Battlefront 2 for example was shovelware.

@JayJ Ya know, my initial reaction was "no, there's a lot wrong with that game but it isn't shovelware" but when I started thinking about it, yeah, it's a greedy cash grab capitalizing on the Star Wars name. Which is one of the two kids of games I consider shovelware. I think most shovelware titles from bigger companies are games that are licensed off of an existing property. Remember the PS2/Gamecube era when every movie under the sun tried to have a game made?

The other being lazy games that are glaringly just copying some popular trend, the the mountain of obvious Minecraft clones we've had at this point.

True but it's easier to find indie shovelware than AAA shovelware and also most of the indie shovelware get a pass on Nintendo Life reviews. I've bought trash trusting Nintendo Life reviews, that's why I don't trust them anymore.

Shovelware affect all platforms but I think that Switch's eShop is poorly organised. Wii U eShop is much better, to name something Nintendo.

@Heavyarms55 I agree, even the 16-bit gen also had it's fair share of "AAA" shovelware with all of those half-assed platformers they had back then based off every popular TV show and movie imaginable back then.

@BlueOcean Yeah I had similar issues with reviews around here, ultimately I don't take them seriously anymore but they still work as a way to get a general idea of what a game is all about. At the end of the day all reviews are just someone's opinion, and more often than not the score derived from that is based off what that particular critic happens to be into. Now a days I am over trying to find new indie games to try out, I have tons of them and I have a pretty good idea of what I am into, what I like and don't like. If something interests me I will check it out and try to get a variety of opinions just to make sure it isn't total crap. Outside of that I think reviews in general aren't a useful way to see if you will like something.

AAA shovelwares don't exist. The definition of those two words are opposite. A AAA game is a big budget game developed by a big team that can reach hundreds of developers. There weren't really AAA before that format emerged in the mid-2000's. A shovelware is a small budget game made by a small team or by just one guy.

It's simple, I even don't go to check the Eshop anymore... It's a mess, it's not attractive and I have the feeling to be in an infinite scrolling list of "whatever"...

@StephanDLW Yes, big companies can make low budget shovelwares but you will never see a big budget game being called shovelware even if it's a lazy game made with few game design work.

No, the big budget trainwrecks aren't called "shovelware", they're called "broken pieces of @#$%". And they try to charge you $60 for the broken mess.

But it's still shovelware.

It doesn't matter how you call them, really, but shovelware implies a big amount of cheap mediocre games, that's what the "shovel" implies. Normally, AAA are not called shovelware but bad games and they are not that abundant because they require a big budget, as the AAA term implies.