OK, I have to make this mini piece. I know I said no more Opinion pieces until my big big upcoming article is done, but this recent situation, and sorta how it reminds me of my own journey working on SFG over ten years, really drove home to me why I started this site to begin with, and just how infuriated I am that a big site I used to look up to and even post back in my insufferable teenage years decided to “fix” the bad eShop everyone’s been rightfully ripping into.
But why would I be mad? Surely Nintendo Life did the common sense thing of highlighting obscure indie games, helping people find and discover sweet hidden gems, and filtering out anything with a very blatant to the human eye shovelware banner, right? Mistakes can be made, but surely they wouldn’t just classify anything uncategorized as shovelware right
oh no
So yeah. That’s the biggest issue with Nintendo Life’s Better eShop. A bunch of uncategorized, hastily thrown together titles that I presume are just all grouped as shovelware because they weren’t games anyone had heard of and surely nobody would mind if obscurities would get buried this way.
Except with how Better eShop works, you can’t find anything in Shovelware if you search for a game by default, meaning that in a cruel way, it makes trying to find obscurities way, way tougher than using the actual eShop! Somehow quite a feat when you consider how the real deal is struggling to not explode whenever you try and open it up on a real switch.
Before I go into why I think this is A: badly handled, B: not done in good faith hardly at all and C: needs gargantuan ground up work to fix instead of trusting a community with a known history of toxicity to filter for you, I decided to make this next bit of this short opinion piece a semi-positive one; me going through several games labeled by Nintendolife as “Shovelware” as of the beginning of this writing process, debunking why that’s nonsense, and hopefully recommending some cool gems you might seriously not know about as I do so.
If you take one thing away from this article, even if you disagree with my later points, I hope you find cool games to play that a big-sized originally didn’t deem worth investigating beyond a surface level. So, what did NL think was shovelware at first? Some have been fixed by the time this article goes live (hundreds of other games were manually fixed over the past few days as I began writing this early on 01/18, but that still didn’t excuse the fact that well-made indies were thrown into the bin to begin with), but honestly, I’d not be surprised if some of these games were mentioned for the first time in years via this article, which is exactly the point I’m making about why blanket assumptions are bad. Some of these as of 1/19, when I’m writing this, have since been reversed and I’ll note which ones were, but my point here is to illustrate what was autobinned and help you find something new to play, before we get to my main opinion.
Anywho, for the obscurities.
Conclusion
I could go on and on, showing more examples I captured yesterday; thankfully a bunch of those have now been unmarked of the shovelware tag, but quite a few remain that shouldn’t, and it goes to show just how horribly implemented this process was in the first place. It seems to my guess anything which wasn’t on a pre-approved whitelist at first, just got thrown into the shovelware bin in the hopes the community would salvage the ones which aren’t actually shovelware, fix it up, and lead to a very perfectly curated online eShop with no problems whatsoever. Indeed, that’s part of the stated claims on Nintendolife, to have it be a community effort to help people find games.
That’s great and all, but when you try to report a game, or do anything to give feedback, it prompts you to log into the Hookshot network brand of websites; the wide banner that takes up sites like Nintendo Life and Time Extension. No login, no report, and no way to help them fix mislabeled games short of yelling at site staff about it on social media. It should also be noted by default, any game marked as shovelware would not show up in any search results, period, making hundreds of obscure games even more obscure this way.
Needless to say, plenty of people rightfully got very mad when this eShop was revealed and people saw the stuff automatically thrown into the bin; tons of obscurities and even well regarded games by indies who respected the site, were just lumped into this giant ball with a very loaded word being used to blanket describe thousands upon thousands of games.
This is what got me pissed off. Seeing plenty of indies I follow on Bluesky and discord, heartbroken their eShop game they put work into getting thrown into the shovelware bin with no rhyme or reason, having to go on and yell at the team behind the better eShop to fix their shit, and then them doing so quietly, time and time again. It’s clear that Nintendo Life didn’t launch the eShop wanting to deliberately harm indies, they just launched it in an ignorant fashion not thinking that their blanket ban would have caught anything significant in the crossfire.
Cure hundreds of posts pointing out assorted games marked as shovelware in the first few days, and those games all getting undone over time. I 100% bet any game I showed with a shovelware tag in this piece will be undone by the end of the week, but that isn’t the point. The point is these games should have never been associated with such a loaded word to begin with, and to do so is absolutely disrespectful to any independent developer working their asses off in an already tense, unstable industry.
“But oh they pledge to fix the errors and have the community help make things better for future games! They’ll get it right. 🙂 ” you may say, but to that I say “Ah, have you seen community led tagging systems before? Have you seen steam?” The amount of times a game gets meme tagged on steam, or a game with a minority character which isn’t too big to fight off waves of bigotry if a bad actor decides to stir that up and wreck their tags, is way too much for me to be comfortable with, and that’s a site with millions of people.
Now Nintendo Life/hookshot? I’m pretty sure their community nowadays of commenters aren’t that big, and I dunno if you’ve visited an Nintendolife comment section lately, but they ain’t great! I remember a recent, great article from them about the need for more transgender characters in media, pointing to the TTYD remake as a recent good example, only for the comment section to be as hellish as you might expect. Notice the amount of removed comments due to being blatantly bigoted? The amount of dismissive, stupid comments completely ignoring the point of more representation being a net positive? Yeah that’s the community that’ll help label games for this better eShop! See the problem?
You may have a bunch of them thinking a new release that’s a super obscure, one-man indie project looks like absolute shit, or is part of some dumb culture war bullshit stirred up by weird nerds and target a new game with minority representation, and mass report/flag it as shovelware. Will the NL moderators have to go through and fight each instance of that and have more workload on their day? That sure seems like a lot of extra work they wouldn’t have needed if they didn’t make the shop this way to begin with! Sure, a developer could probably intervene and get it on the whitelist easily to be protected from such acts, but that’ll just mean this issue of false flagging, mislabeled games will continue for years to come, and I really, really hope NintendoLife is aware of this risky factor instead of thinking everything will be fine.
To me, it just seems like an extra workload for the site to be taking that I don’t see the need for when sites like DekuDeals exists which already point people toward obscure or cheap games pretty often! So why would they do such a thing? Besides the fact they wanted to, I suppose, the front page has something plainly visible which makes me a little bit irked.
Ah, buy eShop credit? So it’ll just take you to the Nintendo store of your choice and help you find the means to buy eShop cards that you wish, right? Nope. It takes you to Nintendolife/hookshot’s own affiliate partner for online eShop card buying, so rather than getting your ass up and going to the store or buying just the game itself directly from the real eShop, you give NintendoLife a kickback for the heck of it.
Yes, supporting sites means supporting affiliate/sponsorships. Yes, sites need money to survive. Yes, this by itself isn’t a net negative, but when you open your “better eShop”, and have an affiliate link right up front while also mismanaging a bunch of games in a way that make the whole thing feel rushed out the door, it doesn’t take much for me to feel rather cynical about the approach and see it less as a means to “Fix” the eShop, and more to profit off the current frustrations with the eShop and maybe squeeze some extra bucks outta it, none of which will line the pockets of indie developers.
Ultimately, this is the true issue with Better eShop: fixing a mess as big as the eShop on Switch isn’t gonna be easy, and just hastily throwing anything that looks off or you aren’t personally familiar with and then fixing it later is just bad optics. Especially when dozens of new eShop games hit the US store every single week, and you’re not gonna catch all the obscurities the first time around, especially if a community of commenters that isn’t the most well-intentioned are in charge.
Will the Better eShop be a place with cool categories highlighting obscure, but rad indies you should check out in a year’s time, and they fix most or all of the issues I and others have listed here? I kinda hope so, but I also don’t feel the most hopeful this place is being run in 100% good faith. I’d love to be wrong, but based on the messy rollout, them already making swift changes for the better which really make me doubt any planning went into the rollout to prepare for such a reaction, I have a lot of uncertainty going ahead, and I hope despite my harshness, this does end up being taken as serious feedback to fix the biggest flaws of this better eShop before it gets too late, and ends up harming indie developers who need support more than helping them.
