Are changes coming?

Update: Courtesy of a tweet from Nintendaan, it appears to be the case that the Japanese eShop is scheduled to go down for maintenance from 3am until 12pm on 4th October, making this a little more intriguing.

So, Nintendo of Europe is hosting a Nintendo Direct broadcast on Thursday 4th October at 7pm British standard time/8pm central European time. On top of that there's eShop maintenance scheduled for Europe between 7pm BST/8pm CET on 3rd October and 4am BST/5am CET on 4th October, a little over 12 hours before that Nintendo Direct event.

It could all be standard maintenance and one big coincidence, but it could also be the laying of foundations for a new feature or app to be announced later in the day by NoE boss Satoru Shibata. An update is also confirmed for the Japanese eShop — see update above — so we'll have to keep our eyes peeled on Japan and Nintendo of America to see if these regions run their own Nintendo Direct broadcasts.

Let's pretend that this is no coincidence and that Nintendo is about to unleash some eShop related awesomeness. What would you like it to be? Speculate with wild abandon in the comments below.

[source twitter.com]