Topic: The shovelware on the e-shop has become a real issue

Feels like I'm looking for games on a mobile phone. New releases is just a sea of low effort obvious mobile phone dev games. You really need to know what you're looking for. I feel like Nintendo should have really done something to help filter and divide it.

@JayJ
If you call the games by Outright Games like Paw Patrol, My Little Pony, Ben 10, Jojo Siwa, Blaze & the Monster Machine, PJ Masks, etc as shovelwares, I really disagree.
I really the supporter of those games by Outright Games and they are not shovelwares.
Just because the games are not Zelda or Metroid, it doesn't mean they are shovelwares.
Even I vote the shovelware games over than Zelda botw / ttok.

@Anti-Matter I was thinking more like all these no-name cheap mobile phone ports. It seems to be about 90% of the games on offer every week if not more.

I hope Nintendo implements better search options in the future.

Steam does this pretty well, I find, where you can filter results based on dozens of different tags like; indie, platformer, 2D or 3D, metroidvania, jrpg, female protagonist, dragons, shooter, deck builder,... you name it. And then it even lets you sort those results by; new and trendy, top sellers, top rated, discounted and upcoming.

Would be great to have this on the eShop as well.

I fully rely on my wishlist. Personally, I only buy one or two full price games a year - so it's easy to lose track.
Do I love having to curate the list myself? Not really. But I have a list of things that I'm 100% interested in, and reminders when they go on sale.

Part of me does miss the early days because we didn't have as much on the eShop. A smaller game could get tons of love and attention. These days they will be buried on launch day.

I assume that's why so many small developers rely on Nintendo Directs for advertising, it's all about the wishlist ~
Same goes for Steam and other storefronts though.

What I want to know is who buys it?
There must be titles that nobody has ever bought, surely? There must be a market for them to bother doing it I guess, but it just amazes me that people look through the e-shop and buy some of them. Once upon a time, these type of games were the thing an unsuspecting Granny would buy for little jimmy in a shop because 'he likes the video games and this is one of them!' but the E-shop is a different model entirely. You have to look through and purposefully buy it for that device!

@JayJ I don't tend to browse the eShop very often myself as, most of the time, I only really go on it if I already have a game in mind that I want to buy but yeah I 100% feel your pain. There's truly no worse feeling than seeing the homepage load up and getting flashbanged by about 4-5 low-effort games with AI-generated artwork 😔

If you're looking to browse the eShop without having to deal with the horrendous quality control though I'd highly recommend using DekuDeals as it gives you every game that's currently on sale while also filtering them by general review aggregates from sites like Metacritic and such, leading to you seeing a generally far higher level of quality than you would through Nintendo's official methods.

I agree with you. I rely on Deku Deals because trying to browse the eShop is such a pain.

@JayJ I'm also tired of the droves of shovelware releasing with the ridiculous sale prices to manipulate the eshop sales algorithm. It such a trashy scam. If these publishers/game devs can't sell their trash shovelware on release day at their decided regular retail price, they have no business on eshop.

If @nintendolife thinks it could help make a difference, I wouldn't mind if NL did a brief story just to highlight and bring attention to the issue. @Liam_Doolan (I tagged you Liam in case you're interested in the topic, since you authored the most recent eshop articles on NL.)

The e-shop is only good for buying what you're already planning on getting, and even then, it's just easier and faster to use the web version. DukuDeals is superior in every way for wishlist curating, filtering, and discovering.

Just curious, what games you called shovelwares?
Because if somebody called the games from Outright Games are shovelwares, you have to face with me because I played some of the games from Outright Games and they are not shovelwares.

The next iteration of the eShop needs better filtering options - in fact I would go as far as blocking options. Age ratings you don’t want Little Johnny getting at, genres you’re not bothered about, and most of all - specific publishers. I would apply the latter to all of the keyword bingo title scammers on the spot.

Too many devs are reposting their limited libraries in the form of "bundles", which artificially bumps old releases to the "new releases" section. Many of these bundles are otherwise identical to other bundles.

While the old system wasn't perfect, it drastically reduced the amount of absolute crap in the eShops, and with classification fees being virtually non-existent for digital/indie releases nowadays, I think Nintendo ought to consider putting those barriers to entry back up.

I think that the radical solution would be for Nintendo to launch several different shops - all installed by default.

One would be a "premium" eShop with lots of quality control and all the 1st party games - this shop would be like the early days of Switch and I'd expect Nintendo to charge high % commission on sales.

Another eShop could just be like the wild west we have now - without the 1st party games - drop the % commission right down low, low, low and let anyone sell any old rubbish. Visibility in such a shop would be an issue and it wouldn't benefit from the eyeballs that browsers looking for 1st party games bring but I'm sure that some developers might be able to make such a setup work for them much better than the current system.

In theory it'd be a win-win situation for everyone.

I browse the new games article in the eshop every week and wishlist the ones which look most interesting. And eventually most of those I wishlist get a review either on a minor review site or YouTube.

That said, they do seriously need to improve things. A rating system would be nice plus better search options. And although the eshop highlights the very best games well, it would be nice if they had some type of 'trusted dev' rating or something to at least filter the medium games from the absolute junk. And maybe 100% new devs could be highlighted separately so they don't get lost.

You have 50 new eshop games a week but 100 million players. That is 2 million people per game. And the crappiest games often go on sale for like $2, making impulse buys easy. I bet everything gets some sales. Plus, I bet every obscure genre has some fans willing to risk a little money on a potentially bad game. I tend to buy all cheap cat platformers. Someone else on this site said they buy most games with bunnies. There are a lot of people out there. 😆

Although the percentage of these in terms of all releases are small, the fact that there tends to be at least a couple every week is annoying. I'm sure Nintendo could find a variety of ways to patch these type of exploits if they cared to. The biggest problem is they often end up near the top of the sales list. The sales list (2,000+ games always) is definitely the most worthless and actively exploited part of the eShop right now.

I mean... Switch does let you filter by price, genre, and age rating. So you 100% can look at only e.g. recent games of certain genres that are not free to play. And early access doesn't even exist on Switch. That said, even though all those filters exist, they could certainly improve them.

It’s impossible to look at discounts or new releases without seeing three hundred games titled like… Super Hentai Girl Ultra Deluxe Definitive Edition Bundle.

And then it’s so sad when you see a game that seems fine, but it ends up being from those same publishers and that ruins it.

I mean, Switch has 10 times as many games as 3DS. More good games but inevitably more bad games as well. I feel like Nintendo could do a better job at blocking actual scamware and the occasional game which simply doesn't work, but I can understand them not wanting to gatekeep whether a particular indie is potentially good or not. A large percentage of eshop games are merely mediocre (e.g. 5/10 type games) and if you happen to like that type of game they can still be a lot of fun.

It was probably harder or more expensive to release games back then, but every digital shop all the way going back to the Wii had its fair share of shovel ware.

It was just a lot less repetitive, back then they would release the one bad title and leave it at that; now they re-release it 20 times with new keywords.

Back then Nintendo wouldn’t allow any sort of raunchiness either.

It amuses me that most of those games titled hentai are rated T for teen. I guess they are simple puzzle games with bikinis? In new games, there is basically 1-2 a week like that. That is out of 50-ish so it's not a huge percentage, but I do wish they weren't there. And the exploit which lets them always be at the top of the sales list needs to be fixed.

And yeah, some of the publishers of those trash games actually make some really good games too. Those publishers confuse me.