- Nintendo Life launches ‘Better eShop’, an “improved” alternative to Nintendo’s online store
- The store features content filters, better discoverability, faster load times, and more
- ‘Better eShop’ was created following community feedback on Nintendo’s eShop
Nintendo Life has officially launched ‘Better eShop’, an alternative to Nintendo’s online store with an improved user experience and discoverability.
‘Better eShop‘ was created after the website asked its community what they would like changed about Nintendo’s current eShop, which Switch players have previously expressed frustration with due to its layout and overabundance of games.
“The Nintendo Switch eShop launched with the console back in 2017,” the About page reads. “Since then there have been minimal improvements to the eShop interface and the storefront has been flooded with 1000s of new ‘games’, which could often be described as spam. It is now a chore to use with no signs of change, aside from Switch 2.”
With ‘Better eShop’, Nintendo Life has now implemented many features that improve upon users’ issues, including customizable content filters to sort through genres that automatically filter out “spam” games, refined discoverability, and added user reviews.
Load times are also much faster than the eShop’s, a dark mode has been added, and has been optimized for mobile. There’s also an option to purchase Wii and Wii U music, as well as the ability to add and remove items to a cart, however, “as as a limitation of the actual eShop you will still need to buy each game individually.”
Nintendo Life also plans to add wishlist functionality, a way to display screenshots on the game page, display all users’ reviews in one play, mute publishers, and add more regions. For now, it’s limited to just the US, UK, and the EU.
According to the About page, ‘Better eShop’ was built in less than a week, and sits on top of the Nintendo Life game database.
“Data has been collected from various sources and is updated daily,” it reads. “It’s quite possible that Nintendo will start blocking us from gathering the data – but until then, we will continue to build and improve the Better eShop.”