Topic: 2024 In Review: All My Homies Hate The eShop

[Shaymin]

To those who noticed the eShop is full of unmitigated junk this year: WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG???

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/editorial/69590/2024-in-review-all-my-homies-hate-the-eshop

When Nintendo launched their Year in Review site in mid-December, I did click in to see what my time on actual games was this year, knowing full well that I’d probably have to at least double it to account for all the time I was checking various regional eShops on weekends to update the Downloads articles. It turns out that doubling it wouldn’t have been sufficient to account for all the time I lost clicking into asset flip #3,418, alleged hentai game #71, or generative AI product #183, because the numbers were GRIM.

According to Nintendo, my games played for the year total was 25. Scrolling through the list reveals multiple NSO apps, presumably because I booted into all of them (across both the West and Japan) to make sure I had all of the games available just before the cutoff. Since there are seven apps (NES, SNES, GBC for regular NSO and N64 regular, N64 Mature, Genesis/Mega Drive, and GBA for the Expansion Pack), that means I played 11 actual games this year for about 82 hours. Or what I’d spend in a three month period setting up those articles. Nintendo, my time is not cheap, and in order to account for your inability to stem the tide after four years I’ll send you the bill in early January. Based on my salary, how does US$10,000 sound?

At least this year, more and more people are calling out Nintendo’s unwillingness or perhaps inability to surface quality content in an efficient purchasing experience this year. And to that I say Arceus be praised; we might actually see some changes on the Switch successor that I’ve been calling for for years. The rise of artificial “intelligence” programs or plagiarism machines has also given rise to a new accepted term for the average eShop release in 2024: slop. Short, sweet, and to the point. Just the way I like it.

But this is nominally a numbers column, so let’s get into it. (All numbers available here: they are accurate to within +/- 1% 19 times out of 20, and do not account for delistings whether initiated by the publisher or force-removed by Nintendo for copyright/trademark infringement as was seen with “Unpacking Universe Dreams” in early December. Following very public callouts from the developers of Unpacking.)

Between January 1 and December 31, 2024, there were 2,727 games released on the Switch eShop in North America. That means there have been 5,158 games released on Switch in the last two years, or a bit more than the output of the DS and Wii in their lifetimes combined (According to Wikipedia: 3468 DS, 1612 Wii - for a total of 5080.) If we stretch it back to when I started tracking this in 2021, that represents 9169 games on the eShop in North America, or roughly the combined release lists for the GBA, DS, Wii, 3DS, and Wii U. With the releases prior to 2021, the Switch has gotten more games than every other Nintendo hardware in the 21st century combined.

Other numbers related to the 2727:

• Over a 52 week year, that averages to about 52.4 releases a week.
• Although the world record set at the end of last year in Japan (79 releases) wasn’t broken, North America tied it the week of October 24 and Europe was only a game back at 78.
• The most common release count for the year was 55 (occurring four times, or once per quarter).
• The median value of the weeks was 53.5.
• The North American record was broken twice in a month (74 and 79).

Normally this is the part where I’d ask what’s next, but in an ideal world we find that out before the end of March with the Switch successor reveal. Aside from the same things I’ve repeatedly asked for (publisher blacklisting, bundle removal from New Releases, taking publishers of claimed “hentai” games out back and Old Yeller-ing them), there’s been some new things that have come up this year as the store has reached a boiling point.

One is speed. IGN’s Rebekah Valentine asked last weekend why the Switch eShop was so slow, and then I came to a realization that the next digital store front Nintendo designs that runs faster than molasses climbing uphill in January will be the first. The Wii Shop was notorious for its slowness, my limited exposure to the DSi shop was roughly the same, the 3DS and Wii U took a long time to boot and downloads even longer, and the Switch eShop has major pagination issues that have only been exacerbated by the fact that it has to be prepared to load 12,000 games and 120,000 bundles. Running it as a webpage isn’t going to fly on the next system; it needs to basically be a native app the way the Settings menu is on the Switch.

Next is a suggestion that has come up on Discord, specifically from Syrenne McNulty (who has a noted interest in making the eShop suck less): next generation, a game gets three bundles and then any attempt to bundle after that requires manual approval from Nintendo. This would allow certain major publishers to have a few points of price differentiation at launch. (Think of a game like NBA 2K, which might have a Deluxe edition, a “Kobe Bryant” edition, and a “Black Mamba Edition”.) But it would likely cut off the likes of AAA Clock and its 2599 bundles, or stop situations where I go on the eShop on New Year’s Eve and I immediately see two new games and seven bundles for games that have been on the first page multiple times.

And yes, I brought a receipt for this.

The announcement at the end of the year that four Idea Factory games were spiked for content suggests that my last request might actually happen. It is patently absurd that there is even one game released in North America with the six letter phrase that starts with “H” and basically means “pervert”, let alone nearly a hundred. (Once it hit 69, I stopped using the name in titles because it’s making the game list not show up in Google search results with default Safe Search. And Google search is broken enough right now thanks to Prabhakar Raghavan.) If Nintendo is going to hard ban sexual imagery with minors, they should treat games with that name in the title as the Adults Only titles they CLEARLY should be. What’s that? It’s going to ban them from the eShop? Oh, what a tragedy. The fact that the word appeared in titles that released on both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day on what’s supposed to be the most family-appealing system on the market should have Nintendo ashamed.

At the end of the day, I hope the successor has two eShop icons instead of one. The normal eShop icon directs the user to the bespoke eShop for games that only run on the new hardware and games from a curated list of partners given the backwards compatibility. The rest of it can go on a “No Smoking” sign, and the loading screen - which hopefully is only a few seconds - can pop up with “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. Because going into 2025, I’ve already abandoned hope that the Switch eShop can be saved from itself.