Discoverability improvements are coming to Nintendo’s eShop

With the success of the Switch, particularly among independent developers who have seen greater sales on the platform than anywhere else, more and more games are launching on the platform. It’s a great situation for studios and gamers worldwide, but there’s a clear bottleneck when it comes to the Switch’s eShop, which was obviously not designed for such a high volume of releases. Nintendo’s senior manager for publisher and developer relations, Damon Baker, spoke at GDC to make assurances that improvements will be made over the course of 2018 to make discovering great games on the platform a much better experience for all involved.

"We’ve heard the feedback from yourselves, from fans, loud and clear, about the limitations of the Nintendo eShop," Baker said. "I can assure you steps are being taken over the course of the year to improve the functionality in terms of discoverability and visibility, to highlight all of that great content."

These improvements will come in the form of greater visibility outside of the store itself, too. With more work done via social media and the Nintendo website to promote great games. Currently games sit on the front page of the store for only a few weeks before being pushed off. Players then need to search directly or navigate an unwieldy list of titles, with no clear indication of a game’s quality or popularity outside of the store’s charts section. This means successful games stay successful, but makes things difficult for smaller games to break through.

This is clear from the list of best selling indie games on the platform, released by Nintendo during GDC, which includes a bunch of titles that launched early on in the Switch’s lifecycle. More recent games on the list (Celeste and Stardew Valley, for example) saw great marketing and press coverage, and were generally highly anticipated. Hopefully Nintendo’s efforts to improve discoverability will result in some more unexpected breakthrough hits for the platform.

The full list of best selling indie games on the Switch is as follows:

• Celeste
• Enter the Gungeon
• Fast RMX
• Golf Story
• Kamiko
• NBA Playgrounds
• Overcooked Special Edition
• Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
• Stardew Valley
• SteamWorld Dig 2