Since the Switch launched in 2017, it has become a go-to destination for indie developers. It's easy to develop for (and port to), has a massive userbase and is ideally suited to independent games due to its portability and accessibility.
However, we've heard reports over the years that the intense competition on the eShop has meant that many indie titles get ignored or fail to generate the desired revenue, and a new interview on UK trade site MCV certainly backs up this perspective.
Joseph Humfrey, co-founder of 80 Days studio Inkle, laments that the eShop's design is failing a great many developers and publishers, and has led to many companies 'gaming' the system to get attention:
In terms of organic discoverability, the main problem with the eshop is that it’s simply too basic. There’s such a small number of pages where you can be featured, that it massively limits the breadth of potential discovery.
Yes, they have a Discover page, but it’s just one page, where games of all genres and types have to fight for visibility. Beyond that, they have Recent Releases (which you’re guaranteed to be on, albeit for a very limited period of time), Current Offers (which appears to be full of games that are err… gaming the system), and the Charts (which doesn’t even break down into genres as other stores do).
Humfrey is, of course, referring to the process of heavily discounting a game in order to make it rise up the eShop charts and therefore gain exposure; this also happens regularly at launch, with many publishers deciding to apply a discount when the game is released to boost its chances of scoring big in the shop chart.
Mike Rose of No More Robots – which has published the likes of Not Tonight and Yes, Your Grace on Switch – expands a little more on this situation:
I mean, they’re not just gaming the system, they’re unfortunately using the system the best way they can. Massive discounts are now the core way to sell on Nintendo Switch.
If you’ve ever wondered why there are just reams and reams of 80-90 per cent off titles on Switch – including at their bloody launches – it’s because the store is ranked by units, not revenue.
The top charts are the games with the most downloads in the last two weeks. So in other words, if you put your game on 90 per cent off, and as a result, inevitably get a ton of downloads, you shoot up the charts. Then once you’re at the top of the charts, you automatically get a ton of extra sales due to being at the top of the charts.
I really hate it. I try to scream at game devs all the time “don’t devalue your work! Don’t deep discount!” At No More Robots, we haven’t discounted any of our games by more than 40 per cent, even titles that have been out for more than two years.
As a result, we see incredible sales on Steam every single day, because consumers have learned that we’ll never deep discount. Now I’m stuck in a situation where I may be forced to deep discount on Switch, otherwise I literally cannot sell units on Switch. It’s heartbreaking, and it makes me really sad for the eShop.
Rose feels that if this trend continues, we'll see a 'race to the bottom' on the eShop:
The way it’s going now, I reckon in around a year’s time, the eShop is going to look like the App Store – tons of cheap-looking titles that were clearly thrown together in the space of a few months, all selling at a dollar each. And everyone trying to make an honest living on Switch, won’t be able to anymore. I can’t imagine how else it’s going to go.
Humphrey is quick to add that Nintendo has been very active when it comes to helping indies – it's just that the hard work it does isn't always helpful because of the way the eShop is designed:
The strange thing is that Nintendo has actually invested in curation. They have multiple pages on their various international websites, such as #Nindies, Indie World and their Indie Games page. Indie World even produces editorial content – interviews with developers and so on. The problem is that this content isn’t being replicated in the one place where players need it – on the device itself.
My opinion as a developer is that this is a simple organisational problem. The website editorial and content teams are probably entirely separate from those responsible for developing features for the software running on the device.
So how can this be solved? Humphrey has a suggestion:
My hope is that Nintendo will release a big software update in the future that will merge the news and eShop app together into one to create a seamless editorial and store platform all in one place. Currently the transition between reading a news item and going to a relevant eShop page is pretty painful. If they could do that while expanding their curation (and categorisation) effort within the eShop itself, that would be great!
What do you make of these comments? Do you think the eShop's design needs an overhaul, or are you happy with the level of discoverability it currently offers? As ever, let us know by posting a comment.
[source mcvuk.com]
Comments 120
this is one of the biggest Switch problems ....unfortunately, it is not a single one...
They also need to speed up the eshop - it's ridicously slow & you can only scroll down a few rolls on the sales page before it requires a lengthy load so games further down are likely to be missed due to people running out of patience
Spot on. I mean, the PlayStation store has discounts very often, but I find games a lot more frequently by happenstance there. Can’t think of better online stores, but I know for sure that the Nintendo eshop is most certainly not good because of what it lacks, even without comparison.
With over four thousand games available on the eShop it's easy for the actually good games to get lost in the shuffle.
I wish there would be more quality review some how on the eshop cause there are some great gems to be found, but there is also a ton of shovelware that is posted daily. Would be awesome if they would add way gamers could add reviews with stipulation of only way to review is to have purchased game (limit review bots), and we could click on reviews to read them.
The only thing nintendo can do is do more quality control. It's not like indie games are easily visible on the ps store or steam.
He's right in basically all he says unfortunately....
Combining the news and eshop part seems like a no brainer to me.
@Magonigal its laggy as hell isn't it? If I reboot the console fully its back up to speed but quickly slows down again. Such a rubbish system for a console with such a volume of games released so quickly.
“don’t devalue your work! Don’t deep discount!” At No More Robots, we haven’t discounted any of our games by more than 40 per cent"
Looks like the No More Robots team had to backtrack on that to sell as one of their games 'Not Tonight' was recently 90% off on the NA and EU eShops.
Currently in the download exclusive charts on the (Australian) eShop, there are only two really heavily discounted titles in the top 30. One of those (#4 on the list) is actually Not Tonight by No More Robots, funnily enough. Guess they were pretty quick to give into what they were trying to avoid then.
Absolutely right. I find it really hard sometimes to sift through the shovelware. Like how much would it really take to fix this?
eShop and menus badly needs a revamp. Folders is badly needed too.
The Switch eshop is honestly like wading through a mire. So much so I'll use Steam or Xbox to look for games, then manually search them for Switch to see if they are on eshop, add to wishlist, then recheck wishlist every so often for sales. Dragon quest is on sale so debating whether to get Switch version or wait till December for Xbox version.
I think user reviews and spotlights might help, along with type-specific charts. I know there are games I wanted when they launched, but I can't even remember what they are now.
I don't see it as Nintendo's job to promote every indie's game on the eShop as which do you choose out of the 20+ games that are released every week. If you chose one of the games of these two companies, you are then leaving the rest of them with no promotion.
How else do independent developers promote their games though? Can they release trailers on YouTube? There are not many (if any) Nintendo specific magazines out there anymore than can cover indie releases. Can NintendoLife do a weekly roundup (separate from the weekly release list)? It is a difficult time out there but I can't see an easy solution for a lot of them.
I heard this and I think, I think I never bought a game by searching on the store, I find on the internet some good review, put on favorite, wait for sale
Discoverability is always a problem for any kind of entertainment.
The eShop is not the only way to promote your game. I don’t just go browsing the eShop for a game to buy—I hear about a game, add it to my wish list or look it up, etc.
Even if people are buying your game at deep discounts, that doesn’t mean they’re playing it. When things are a buck or two, I’m sure some people just buy it because it’s so cheap. The glut of great games on Switch is real. So is the backlog.
I come across many games by accident on the eshop that are great but I completely ignored them when I read the release news on NintendoLife because the text description sucked, it would help if we could have screenshots along with the weekly release news.
Without screenshots we are left with crap descriptions like this one from last week - “you are shooting your path to find the exit and move on to the next level. Lots of monsters and nasty bosses make your work difficult.” - pretty much describes most of the games made in the past 30 years.
Companys big or small, need to work on their advertisements. Sometimes i read about good games in the comments that i never heard about. Nintendo is not responsible to promote their games.
But they with some in indie directs.
I don't even bother with the eShop. If I hear about a game that sounds good and I want to check it out, I use the Nintendo website.
The eShop needs the rating system and to be able to sort/filter games based on it.
The eshop has zero problems for any discerning enthusiast. I don't go shopping unless I know what I'm buying (with anything for that matter.) So I can't really have an opinion on this as I don't appreciate others spending habits!
For such a huge company and system, the Eshop is undoubtedly poor. Both in design and execution, it's so slooooow and buggy, I find it really irritating, pages load really badly. I mean how difficult is it for one of the biggest video game companies on the planet to get this figured out correctly? Just hire someone to do it.
The Switch eShop is a total trash heap. They still don't even have a friggin' shopping cart, the most basic of all features for online stores.
I don't think I've ever purchased something from the eShop because I just happened to see it and it looked fun, that doesn't happen, the store isn't built for that to happen. I end up manually looking for games I've seen "by chance" on other stores because they actually do have the layout to surprise the user with something new.
@Magician With over 4000 game on the eShop in only around 3 yeara you should question the sheer lack of quality control.
It's great on paper, 4000+ games to play. In reality, the vast majority of those are complete drek not even the google play store would want.
"Then once you’re at the top of the charts, you automatically get a ton of extra sales due to being at the top of the charts"
And that's the real problem here.
Like I've said before, Switch eShop is okay but with plenty of room for improvement, inferior to other stores in some aspects and superior in others (on 3DS eShop, you can never seem to access a proper full A-Z list, and none of the game pages ever indicates if you have already purchased the game or not). But you can't discuss the difficulties in reaching the audience without addressing elephants in the room like the audience's own laziness and foolishness. We customers have more abundant, efficient and accessible means of researching the video game market and its offerings than perhaps all the prior generations combined - but proportionally less motivation to so much as literally lift a finger and tap it at the screen.
Download charts may contribute to visibility, but there's no part of it that you can't access by leisurely scrolling through eShop filters themselves to a cup of coffee (yes, the caching and loading can be clunky at times as well, but it gets the job done) or checking some analogous listings like Deku Deals (with a database of most/all releases regardless of sales, including descriptions and screenshots and blackjack and hoo- I mean, user/reviewer scores), taking note of curious titles and looking them up a quick search away on Google or YouTube. But it bears repeating that blindly grabbing any game (no longer even discounted at the time to boot) on no basis other than it topping some weekly download chart is nothing associable with sound and responsible behaviour. It's no crime to indulge in - your money out the chimney in the end, not mine, - but the market ever having to deal with this even as a remote semblance of standard is a LOT of the issue we're discussing here.
And I can't help feeling bitter that by asking Nintendo to address it on their part, we're partly asking the market to keep courting and supporting our laziness and foolishness at hand. The flaws mostly overlooked by the same eloquent fans who write entire online theses in attempts to "educate" the general audience against other debatable behaviours like MTX whaling and such.
The entire switch eShop is horrible, cheap looking, and extremely outdated. How is it that the nearly decade old eShop for the 3ds is significantly better in every way, and yet Nintendo does absolutely nothing to improve the switch one?!
Discounting a game devalues the work poured into it, but as an unemployed dude in his - sigh - thirties I must say it worked wonders on my wallet. I'll have two half-days of on-call work next week, and then I'll be back to unemployment once more.
So... yeah. Economy being tough on everyone is my hot take on the topic.
This is the exact problem youtube has.. i should know lol just exchange deep discount cheap tricks for click bait and it is the exact same problem. Youtube need to seperate small channels and big channels in a separate search bar
The eshop is not my the best and there is aton of crap games for like a buck.
It's not great....but I recently went back to the Wii U eShop and now appreciate the Switch version so much more!
I have to agree with him; the Switch eShop started out good when the titles were limited but now; with an average of 600-700 titles “on sale” at any one time it becomes a nightmare to search through them all. And as already said, after a few swipes it hangs for a bit before continuing; sometimes even skipping a row (and some people want the music back from the Wii & Wii U era...). 9 games is not enough per page; should be closer to 20. There are so many suggestions to fix things in the store but if I could there are 2:
1) Heavily overhaul filters to be extremely specific, even if you end up with 30+ genres and having to insert the price range manually (and have Nintendo set the genres to prevent playing the system).
2) And the elephant in the room; Quality Control. I understand there is concern that this could lead to lesser known titles or hidden gems being missed but when the alternative involves the opening of a sluice gate of calculators and rapid development mobile games then I’d gladly take the risk. I try to check the PSN & eShop stores weekly but I’ve started skipping the eShop or ending my scan of Sales less than half way through as I have better things to do than scroll through 700 squares for 20min of which 75% is pure dreck.
While the eShop could clearly do with a refresh, I don't use any of the storefronts on my consoles to find out about games. I use the Internet. It's filled with news, reviews, pictures and videos of games. The biggest issue I have with the eShop is that there's no basket feature if you wish to buy multiple games at once.
I use psprices.com and eshop-prices.com to track discounts and deals and which the best eShop to purchase a game off is.
A negative comment by a developer followed by a negative comment thread. 2020 the year of entitlement. Doesn't anyone understand we are in the middle of a pandemic. Get some perspective you selfish man children.
@sixrings I get the comment thread stuff, but to me a developer giving constructive criticism to a distribution platform is far from entitlement. Nintendo could definitely improve it.
I make heavy use of the Wishlist feature to make it manageable, although announced games are really slow to get added (Hotshot Racing still isn't there, for example).
Even that doesn't always work though. Street Fighter 30th Anniversary has been on my wish list for ages. They dropped the price from £44.99 to £24.99 in the UK this week, but it's not a sale price, it's a permanent price drop, so it didn't flag up in any way.
Besides the load of shovelware and the abysmal layout and categorizing, the Switch eShop feels so barren and lifeless without music. It’s a small thing, but I think it’d help.
The switch is due for a major quiality of life update! So much stuff still missing: folders, themes, better eshop etc
@SegaBlueSky that was total sarcasm. I love Nintendo but it has flaws. If you mention said flaws on here you are able "entitled" "troll" "not a true fan" "manchild." I think that's plane silliness but apparently you aren't a true fan if can find any criticism in anything Nintendo does. Or at the very least you have to find about 1000 compliments before you are allowed one complaint to slide.
Sales units gained from discounts shouldn't count towards the charts. It's that simple and would solve the problem in an instant.
@Crockin Pressing down and scanning a page is hard??
The eShop needs flourishes of personality with music and more polished and aesthetically pleasing layouts and sound effects.
Say what you want about the Wii U and it’s somewhat sluggish speeds when navigating menus, but the eShop is so underrated, having some of the most catchy and charming musical arrangements to ever grace a digital storefront and a sleek and organised, yet vibrant design that reeks of Nintendo cheer. There were all kinds of categories, genres, series and games listed in a clear and concise manner. The same goes for the 3DS eShop as well: I’d even argue that the overall user experience on the 3DS eShop is more positive than on Switch.
The Switch eShop in comparison feels like a buggy webpage. Despite the reasoning Miyamoto gave about the Switch OS not having music or many built-in applications because of the necessity to provide a snappy user experience, the eShop is still slow and pages and game icons take an eternity to load, so music wouldn’t hurt: I wouldn’t even mind if they ported the Wii Shop Channel music or Wii U and 3DS eShop music at this point. It just feels lifeless and incomplete without music, or proper sorting options and categorisation.
We also need folders, themes and more charm and customisation: after all, the Switch is part handheld: which is typically a personal device you would want to make your own.
@sixrings Then go out and donate to Covid research, go volunteer at the overwhelmed test facilities.
@NintendoWiiDS The WiiU has the absolute worst eShop I’ve ever seen. The reason it was so slow was due to all the bells and whistles you are suggesting. They actually got rid of all of that but the eShop sees hundreds of thousands of visitors daily, which is why it is so darned slow. Adding other meaningless nonsense will only slow it further.
@thesilverbrick You can sing the Wii music while you browse the eShop! Doot, doot-doot, doot, doot-doot-doot-doot!
Nintendo solved this problem in 1985 by having a Nintendo Seal of Approval. They should bring that back, so we have less rubbish to sift through when we're looking for something good.
@sixrings Ah apologies, just saw your comment on its own out of context. I agree, rabid fanboyism is never a good look.
Ranking by revenue would heavily favour AAA titles. I think a better solution would be that based on unit sales, but if your game is on sale, each unit will count as much as the percentage the customer pays.
Let's say you have a 99% sale. The each unit sold now counts 1% of a regular unit, meaning you will have to sell 100 times the unit to count as a regular sale.
That way you can still have small titles chart, but it's harder to game the system.
Let me guess, the games these grumpy gusses made didn't sell well.
Sounds like a case of sour grapes to me.
The cream always rises to the top.
@Mqblank its not about promoting indies its about discoverability
@JHDK That's a staggeringly ill-informed perspective.
It loads so slowly that I'm forced to use the website instead...
What does Humphrey mean at the end saying, eshop needs more editorial? Like customer reviews? Or more articles about indie games? I dont see customer ratings ever coming, and that seems quite on purpose.
I've watched weekly releases since switch launch, and don't think the proposed changes would change my buying. Or make me notice a game I would have missed (very rare). Although, I'd understand if that behavior is possibly a minority of the switch market. If a large part of the market doesn't watch eshop that closely, maybe these changes could help indie revenue.
@Guitario Yeah, I've also been using nintendo website sometimes to browse eshop for browsing that loads quicker
Figuring out what people are actually willing to pay for a game is not "devaluing" it, it's properly valuing it.
@thesilverbrick those games aren't shovel ware. They're stellar Indies to add to ones infinite backlog in case of pandemic.
He’s absolutely right, I see all the same hallmarks that the Apple App Store went through. It was a slow but steady descent into free to play hell where games are designed to hook you in early and then try to bleed you dry of money when they think you’re hooked.
Wii U remasters aside, I think Nintendo’s strategy of never lowering the price of their games is a good idea. Perhaps they should mandate no games on the eShop cheaper than £15 to discourage app developers dumping rubbish on there?
Would be great if you could play a 5 minute demo of these games, but yeah the Wii eshop was waaaaaaaay better organized and had music!! Also it turned your Wii into a retroconsole with games from SEGA, TGx16, Neo Geo, N64, and MAME. And yet over 10 years later with billions of dollars in the bank the Switch is looking more and more like a giant scam hahaha
It seems to me that his problem is that he already knew how to be successful on the eShop and just choose not to. He already made his explanation known. Of course no one would be able to find your games or know about them if you don't expose them. It's like a child hiding from the cops and later complain why the cops didn't come look for him. Like c'mon if you want to be found just stop hiding.
The article makes valid points. But I could also argue, 80+% discounts gets games on the chart, but ends up decieving buyers that didn't know that's how they got on the chart. I'd like to see a buyers review rating, in that case.
@Magonigal to a degree i'm seeing the speed issue as well which is concerning -because the eshop was very snappy at release which in fact had people support the bare bone design away first but long at it the way it seem to be coded seem to have struggled with actual growth of the games library which makes me wonder if we wouldn't get -better- performances from a reworked eshop doing a better job of dividing stuff in separate categories which could be loaded separately even if it might means a bit more time loading the actual UI itself.
Since I suspect the current design was that of a simplified UI that would take little time on it's own to load(hence why performance seemed to be snappy as they were in the early years og the Switch) but also load the library of even titles you're not directly looking at in the background and thus now struggle with performance because nobody expected how HUGE the eshop would grow over the years.
Like I’ve been saying, even at the very least If Nintendo just adopted the Wii U eshops store layout then that would solve a lot of problems. It is just as much a pain in the ass now to navigate the Switch eshop for us gamers as it is for the game publishers games to be noticed.
I don't really get the hate it gets. The eShop is fast. Waaaaaaaaaay faster than the eShop on the Wii, Wii U, DSi or 3DS. Even compared to the PSN store it's fast.
Sure you can't find every single game on the main page, but that's simply impossible. No digital store does this correctly though. And even brick and mortar stores usually have limited games on the shelves.
But you can always go to the Nintendo website and download the games that way (buy on the website, the game is downloaded automatically to your Switch)
@Magonigal that’s a great point as well! Painstakingly slow and frustrating to the point where you give up or for me, get kicked out of the eshop. Very tough and takes too long to run through 900+ games on sale!!
I hate the eshop on the Switch - it's just lists and lists and lists...
I always use the online page instead via PC (which has the added bonus of making it seem like wizardry that when I get round to playing on the Switch the next time the game I bought is on there!
I don’t even try to find games on the eshop because it is so terribly designed. The design is so bad in my opinion that it wouldn’t have been satisfactory on the Wii.
@Papichulo How could it be a scam if it already gives you more games from other platforms? You got PS1 games, N64 games, GameCube games, Wii U games, SNES games, arcade games, NeoGeo games, PC games, Sega CD games, NeoGeo Pocket Color games, PSP/PS Vita games, GBA games, 3DS games, DS games, NES games, PS3 games, PS2 games, Xbox games, mobile games, Genesis games, etc. Sure you're not getting every retro games but still you got more on Switch than you ever got on the Wii.
I like discounts, and it's not always easy to find what I'm looking for on Steam. Having said that, the e-shop really needs a game rating system like Steam has.
@Crockin Given that no other app store has really fixed it either, presumably quite a bit.
I’ve never bought a game by browsing any of the Online stores. I only load them up to Search for the game I want and buy it.
However if Devs are saying it’s a problem Nintendo should really try and do something about. And it is too slow.
@WoomyNNYes oddly enough I think the WiiU eshop was onto something. Just released on the wrong generation/console and could have without a few things le the music which likely affected load times.
Basically the WiiU eshop wasn't just surprisingly curated but also had great categorization with graphics that in my eyes helped show the appeal of every categories.
For example the indie had their own section and it specifically had for icon a very popular and solid title or mr end up sometimes switched for one nintendo themselves might have wished to promote. For a long while it was this Shovel Knight and titles of similar grade that were shown as the representatives of the "indie" category which also gave in my eyes a nice aspirational goal of what quality an indie title should strive for.
What was also nice is that all clear categories were visible from the -main- page of the eshop rather than having to hunt for them in the search tab. In my opinion that's a standard the Switch eshop could go with emulating even if the categories search tab or the featured tab were nonetheless welcomed additions.
Sadly they're not the default in-home the uncurated/uncategorized Recent Additions page which is instead said default and we know how quickly things get buried there.
If it was me, i'd bring back a "categories/genre" page and i'd make it the default like in the day of the WiiU with clear graphics to promote/inform at a glance what each categories are.
Then i'd put "recent additions" on that page as a preview of the latest additions rather than the full and sometimes overwhelming display that is our current entry point into the eshop.
As the article pointed out it's not that Nintendo itself is unable to do a good job of curating titles as their editorials/videos/etc show but rather that the tool to actually -sell- those promoted titles does a poor job of keeping them visible or even just easily accessible afterward.
Definitely need to update the eShop. Break down top sellers by over all and then by game type. Add a rating system, out of 5 starts, and better filters for searching. Would love to click 4 star and above and find only games at that level, I feel that will cut the shovelware out. Have game recommendation tab, every Monday have like 10 games that are this week's picks that are not Nintendo published and maybe even limit the AAA games allowed on the list at the same time.
This makes me super sad for all those who want more of my money. Maybe they can add an option to the eShop where we can pay more than list price and include an automatic 20% gratuity to the publisher.
Nintendo's eShop should simply be a link to https://www.dekudeals.com
why is there no 'Suggested' based on the games we play? That is the most obvious solution here.
But Nintendo seems to give no f***s about anything related to UI or features on the console
Lack of quality control and accountability is a huge problem. The eShop is filled with garbage that look like they were thrown together by first-year game design students (especially that upcoming and bloody hideous dollar store 3D platformer that the devs have the absolute gall to charge $15 for).
He has some valid points. However rubbish the eShop is, there are a myriad of aspects of what triggers a buy. The most fundamental aspect is looking at the game. Seeing it's performance and USP aspects. Sorry, but a large proportion of the Switch dev's don't do enough marketing. How hard or expensive is it to put up a video!
Hang on a minute, Not Tonight is literally at the top of the eShop charts because they discounted it -90%.
Pot, kettle, black?
To much junk in the shop. They need to sort the 2 dollar mobile games into a different category.
I've always thought the Switch eShop felt like a huge step backwards from the 3DS and Wii U eShops. The 3DS eShop in particular was so well curated with several new categories and fun concepts built into the front page every single week; developer spotlights, genre roundups, top picks from various guest curators(including Nintendolife), and plenty of weekly opportunities for indies to be marketed. It was just fun and I looked forward to checking it out every Thursday. The Switch shop feels like an overly simplified, boring, and uninspired slog in comparison. All Thursday brings now is a heavy new load of shovelware.
Eshop needs a new look and a whole new update to make it faster and have it more organize.
there's also the problem of the eshop having shovelware digital only games. i see A LOT of them...
No huge discounts for 2 year old games? So that's why I've never heard of these guys nor have any of their games.
And a lot of devs tell a different story, especially on Steam. Once they dropped their price by 70%+ they started selling tons. And earned more then when their games were new and sold at full price.
Especially for indi devs like this.
With that said, yeah the eshop is terrible...
I have a suspicion becoming the App Store is precisely what Nintendo wants to happen. That's a ridiculous profit generator for Apple and Google, and Nintendo likely sees the gateway to that kind of revenue, and the young demographic that feeds it and is thinking "cool, we're close now!"
This isn't "quality first" Nintendo anymore, it's "investor return first" Nintendo now.
The eShop is truly a mess though. So much garbage content, so horribly organized, so SLOW to operate on the device. I don't know why it's so much slower now than when it launched. I'm guessing it needs NEW Nintendo Switch to speed up though.
I do scroll through the sales for a bit check out some reviews on some of the interesting names then maybe give them a go! Xx
@diwdiws But with over 6000 games on the eShop, it will be very difficult even with the best search features to find the games without knowing about them beforehand.
Things I would do if publishing a game
1) List it on the Coming Soon page. The sooner the better to get it out there.
2) At the very least, put a video on the eShop page of the game. A demo is even better but not always possible depending on what Nintendo charges to put demos on the eShop (if they do)
3) Send advance copies or codes for sites like this one to play the game. Just try and get exposure.
Nintendo has never had a good store front for its consoles so instead of complaining about them, get creative in getting the game out there.
@NEStalgia I imagine the cool little feature where hovering over the game picture on the search/menu screen scrolls through the pictures can't help matters.
Competition is everywhere in every industry. Businesses closes every day especially during these hard times. Nothing to wine about really. Or you think the small retailer at the corner really wants to discount everything at 70% off for fun?
@jimtendog Thanks, missed this website some how!
Those people that think that's a problem are the same ones that want Game Pass to be on Switch.
Do note that No More Robots released Nowhere Prophet recently on Switch and PS4 with 95% of total sales between the two for it on Switch.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/indie-publisher-suggests-small-indie-games-might-b/1100-6480502/
The eShop is extremely basic, but I don't really look at it as the way to discover games, just to see what's out there. I generally look at the shop, and if a game catches my eye, I'm off to the web to see what a few reviews and YT videos have to say.
But as someone who would like to put a game on a Nintendo system someday, this does sound worrisome. Nintendo really does tend to pay the least amount of attention to their online stores nowadays and that is ironically where most gamers are buying their games now.
My eshop experience is:
I check every game in the new releases as they come,
add them to my wishlist,
Scroll through that wishlist every once and a while, trimming the fat,
looking for one game at a time that I'll actually play.
It should be easier than this, I agree. But I haven't let as many great games go by unplayed.
I have mixed feelings on the eShop in general. I love that anyone can publish and there is no gatekeeper, but at the same time deep down I want a gatekeeper.
One of the things I appreciated about Xbox 360's arcade storefront was that they curated it to a few releases a week and there was a fixed pricing structure to those releases. It at least gave each game a dedicated window (1 week) to be "featured" and find an audience (required demos also helped in this regard). This would reduce the cruft clogging the storefront because for every "Untitled Goose Game" there are a thousand knock-offs with fancy art that are just there to suck in money from unsuspecting people.
Heck even adding in a place to show Metacritic scores would help, as you would instantly know to be wary if a game couldn't even get the minimum of required reviews to have a Metacritic rating.
95% of the games on the eshop should be removed. Do we really need asset flips and shoveware?
"I reckon in around a year’s time, the eShop is going to look like the App Store – tons of cheap-looking titles that were clearly thrown together in the space of a few months" He wrote this a year ago, right? Because this is exactly what the eShop looks like to me. And I thought the 3DS eShop was bad!!
Doesn't help that there's loads of shovelware every week. Called it early on, and it's only gotten worse. Even if you don't want to call it shovelware, just the sheer number of releases every week is nuts. Every week there's like 30 new releases on the eShop, it's too much. The system's success and popularity is its downfall when it comes to the eShop.
Plus the eShop's performance is...lackluster. Even paging through all of the new releases every week is painful, and performance only seems to degrade the further down the list you go.
Also agree that my eShop usage is largely relegated to the wishlist — look through new releases every week and flag whatever I'm interested in, check my wishlist every week for sales or whatever I'm interested in playing at the time.
Let us review games that we have purchased!
@BenAV
Well, then the system works. As they say, the trick with the 90% off sale is not just increasing the sales right then, but precisely to put the game on the best seller chart and remain there a few days or even weeks after the sale ends, to scrap as few or as many sales as they can at full price.
Right now, in my eshop games like Ultimate Chicken Horse, Mark of the Ninja Remastered, Bad North and the Deer God are in the top 30, and they are all full price, but they also had steep discounts in the recent days. In a couple of weeks Moto Rush GT, Super Bit Blaster XL, Seeders and Toki Tori will be in the same position.
I'm probably in the minority, but I still don't understand. Who goes into the eShop thinking "what can I spent my money on"?, where discoverability is such a make or break feature of an online store. And how is the eShop worse or different than say the Xbox store in that regard? I frequent that a lot, and I don't see a difference. Maybe they're expecting something like the iOS App Store with its editorial recommendations, but from what I've seen in the consoles I have this is how their stores are.
@sixrings I wasn’t referring to any specific games in particular. But to deny that there is an abundance of low-quality content on the eShop is absurd.
@Discostew Good find - these guys just aren't happy with anything, are they?
"Waaah, Nintendo's storefront is so bad, we only sold 20x times as much on it as on Sony's, waaaah..."
Or you can have a game good enough to get traction on Twitter where then game journalists cover it and publishers want to publish it there by making players want to play it.
While the eShop does need work, it's also up to the publisher to promote their games. I haven't even heard of Not Tonight or Yes, your Grace.
Good indies with good promotion don't have a problem selling.(Axiom verge, Steamworld games, Shovel knight, and more recently, eiyuden chronicles, which was a successful kickstarter).
idk, i feel like i'm aware of what i'm interested in on the eshop, just check recent releases and coming soon, wishlist and wait. stopped browsing the great deals section and just see if items on my wishlist are discounted. i miss when featured wasn't the first page shown when you open the eshop though
@nhSnork @NEStalgia
Completely agree with these two viewpoints, #26 and #87
I only go onto the eShop after I have already made my decision on what to purchase, usually after researching the product as well as its history of sales on DekuDeals.
However, like @NEStalgia says, it is easy to forget that people like us who frequent a dedicated gaming website are in the tiny minority of consumers. The reality is that the quality of customer awareness and discernment has gone out the window. The vast majority of players only notice the most heavily marketed first-party titles and the most viral indie hits shared within their social media orbit.
Along with a myriad of redesigns and options needed to refresh the OS, the eShop needs two immediate changes:
1) merge the News and eShop pages like this article suggests: more editorials and discoverability immediately available within the eShop, with more specific top 10's like Nintendo.com's Game Store
2) @Old-Red is right on the money: sales gained from discounts should not count toward the top charts. This could possibly be one of the smallest changes that would make a big impact on the few categories featured on the eShop's front page.
Another issue is that games go on sale for 85%, 90%, 95%, 99%(!!!) off for weeks at at time! Not even Steam allows this! Until they can overhaul the whole shop here are a few things I wish Nintendo could do in the mean time.
1: Discounts only go up to 75%.
2: Threaten the developers who game the system with de-listment if they keep having "Heavy sales"
3: Remove the trash games (You know, the ones that often go "on sale") and refund the buyer with equal amount of gold points (Buy a removed game for 1 dollar, get 100 points
4: HAVE SOME BLOODY QUALITY CONTROL! You think with that fapping game and the asset flip a while back they should of stopped and said "Maybe we shouldn't allow everything to be on our store..."
With all of the $$$ they are making, they need to fix this up.
@stevep This! It’s super hard to tell what a game is about in those lists especially when it involves poor translation. Screenshots would help a lot
I look at all games on sale. Other than that if you don't promote you do not get my attention so the way the eShop is set up is fine with me.
Well those are nice arguments. Just too bad they're made by a hypocrite. They've deep discounted for 80 or 90% recently.
@retrotheigyer_77 The Homebrew Channel on the Wii has all that plus romhacks, free fanbrews, and FREE ONLINE. What a novel concept, right? NOT charging people to use their own internet to play games.
You would think with all those billions Nintendo is making, they'd invest some cash to make a decent online system that doesn't suck. Windows 98 had more customization than the Switch lol
Nintendo don’t care about all these whinning sounds, as they don’t care about themes, folders, or anything the fan base is urging to add to get back at the 3ds menu level.
The only thing worse that the Steam store is the Nintendo store.
Yes, people like us have our own ways of discovering good games, and we'll always use them. But that ignores the plight of the majority of players whose gaming hobby is restricted just to the gaming device — people who don't daily check the news for interesting releases, and who don't have an awareness of quality Indie devs.
And that ignores the plight of the quality Indie devs who need to make their work discoverable amongst the dreck without the huge marketing budgets that AAA publishers have.
And that ultimately hurts Nintendo, because if people can't find good games that aren't the handful of good high-budget games, they'll see the Switch as just another source of cheap junky games.
What has always made Nintendo stand out in the marketplace is its focus on "kaizen" quality. That's getting seriously diluted now and they urgently need to do something about it.
Still trying to figure out why there are titles available on the Wii U shop and not on the eShop. I would've made it priority one to get all available titles mapped for the Switch. You're missing an opportunity. Oh, and an option to hide games I'm uninterested in would be lovely. Lol.
Didn’t read all the comments so forgive me if this is redundant but wasn’t Not Tonight just on sale for $2.50 from $24.99, 90% off?
@Magonigal YESSS 1000x to this. I keep wondering if my switch is overheating because the chugging on the eShop is abyssmal. It's not bad enough that 60% or more are just straight up garbage, they have to make it a slog to go through, too.
The problem is the digital age. Before the internet became such a staple of everyday life, you'd visit game stores and look at every game box on the shelf, and pick what you thought looked cool. You'd look up and down, in all the nook and crannies to find a potentially hidden gem. Now most games get hidden, or buried, behind a webpage that isn't at the forefront, and we instinctively dismiss what isn't right in front of us as mediocrity. The physical act of foraging for "hope" is lost in this domain. The reality is though, there are more great games being released weekly than there's ever been, but 90% of the developers will go unrewarded because of how competitive and bustling the system is.
@KryptoniteKrunch Those are bad examples. Those games all started on 3ds, where there was significantly more quality control and people didn't need to slog through more than maybe a dozen new 3ds eShop titles in a month. That was before the gaming of the system allowed by deep discounting. Plus, back then, eShop prices were FAIR. I've seen crap I'd expect in the 5-8 dollar range in the 20-25 range. It's kinda ludicrous.
@AlexSora89
There's also the argument that an older game likely should be discounted. I mean decreaseing the price brings in sales you likely otherwise wouldn't have gotten for a multitude of reasons (i.e. maybe some the remaining people simply don't agree that your game is worth the initial price for them).
A friend I know puts sale or return greeting cards into stores, outlets etc. Example, he gets an owner to takes his cards, and they sell very well. The owner likes this and within a year he has six companies supplying him cards. His profit goes up because he is offering his customer choice. But my friends card sales suffer because the customer have to much choice.
The eshop is already an app type store. If the developer doesn't sell enough in the early days, their game gets lost and a sale or heavy advertising is the only way to bring it back to the public's attention again. But the gamers know they can stick a title in their wishlist and with in a short time it will be on sale.
What developers do to counter act this is put the game on at silly prices knowing they will have to reduce them. Choice is good for the consumer but not for the majority of developers. Same thing happens in the book market with so many self published books.
Of course Nintendo will suffer because their game sales must suffer with to much choice. But I guess they recoupe this by the profit they take from the small developers.
Bring back the Wii Shop Channel music and I'll be happy.
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