The Nintendo Switch's eShop has led to a market crash, causing a decline in Indie games and causing developers to abandon the platform, resulting in a decline in the Indie scene.
The Nintendo Switch, launched in 2017, was described as a "gold rush" for independent game developers. The platform's eShop initially had room for new releases, with around 1,000 games added in its first year or so. In 2024, GameDiscoverCo reported that 50 games were added per week, resulting in more than 2,300 new games by November. However, what started as a gold rush for indie developers slowly soured, and eventually the eShop became overrun with subpar content. This pushed some developers to the margins, while platform degradation soured the experience as a whole.
Coming out of the so-called indie apocalypse, the period after the indie golden age from 2008 to 2015, developers were reeling from the massive influx of competition and a decline in discoverability. The eShop, for some time, seemed poised to support that period of growth; days ahead of the Switch’s launch date, the company announced that it had already locked in more than 60 “quality indie games” for 2017. PC Gamer reported in October 2017 that “almost every indie release on Switch” had sold better on Switch than on other platforms. Enter the Gungeon sold more than 75,000 copies in just two weeks, developer Dodge Roll Games said. Team Meat posted in January 2018 that Super Meat Boy’s first day on Switch had “shockingly close” numbers to its Xbox 360 debut. SteamWorld Dig 2, one of the titles Nintendo was boasting about, sold between five and 10 times more copies on Switch than it did on Steam, per a PC Gamer report.
Rodrigue Duperron of Spiritfarer developer Thunder Lotus says that the studio “missed the gold rush” when it published Jotun on the Switch in April 2018 but was still “quite pleased” with its performance. (It was published on Wii U in 2016.) “I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that monthly releases to the eShop still numbered in ‘mere’ dozens in early 2018,” he says. Thunder Lotus expected its next game, Sundered, to sell better, but Duperron said the team was “mildly disappointed”—and” pointed to the massive increase of games released monthly. “It didn’t feel at the time that shovelware or bargain basement titles were yet flooding the platform, but this was more of a low simmer, which would come to a boil over the next few years,” he says.
Over the eight years since the Switch launched, the platform became crowded. It began looking a lot more like Steam, which is blasted daily with new games. The Switch, clearly, is not immune from the low-effort games that muck up the market. In recent years, they’ve gotten a name: eShop slop. As IGN put it in February, slop games are distinct from the otherwise “unremarkable games” that get released every day. They’re rarely what they’re advertised as, are based on popular or trending concepts, and are rife with technical issues.
Nintendo has made tweaks to its system over the years, but its biggest one happened recently, likely in anticipation of the Switch 2. Nintendo updated how it ranks games in its top-sellers category, changing the ranking from number of sales to highest sales. James Barnard of Let’s Build a Zoo developer Springloaded says this system “could help reduce certain titles climbing the charts solely through continued deep discounts.”
Nintendo is trying something like this with its “Game Finds for You” feature so that players don’t have to “search every nook and cranny” of the eShop. Nintendo senior director Takuhiro Dohta addressed performance on the eShop, stating that it will run more smoothly even with a huge amount of games.
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Jenny, the tech wiz behind Jenny's Online Blog, loves diving deep into the latest technology trends, uncovering hidden gems in the gaming world, and analyzing the newest movies. When she's not glued to her screen, you might find her tinkering with gadgets or obsessing over the latest sci-fi release.What do you think of this blog? Write down at the COMMENT section below.
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