Nintendo Switch: Nintendo adds “Featured” section on the Nintendo eShop
In the past few months, the number of weekly releases on the Nintendo eShop of the Nintendo Switch has been steadily increasing. Take last week for example: there were more than 30 releases across Europe and North America!
For publishers and indie developers, this is quite a challenge, as their fresh new game quickly gets buried under the steady stream of releases. Nowadays, you generally get to stay on the front page of the Nintendo eShop a week, and not much longer.
Sometimes, you don’t even get to stay on the front page for a full week, depending on which day of the week you released your game: that’s why some developers choose to release their games on Friday or Saturday, so that their games can stay at the top of the front page as long as possible (since most of the releases are on Thursday).
One way to improve discoverability for your game is to put it on sale. And this does seem to be working (at least for some developers like Atooi), though this is more a stop-gap fix than a proper solution: you can’t really have sales every odd week. Even if you do, you risk making people wary of your game: if it’s on sale too often, people might wonder if there isn’t something wrong with it.
In order to improve discoverability on the Nintendo eShop, Nintendo still has a lot to do. But at least, things are slowly (but surely) improving: today, a new section opened, called “Featured” (the name may be different in your region/country).
As the name implies, it’s a list of Featured games, actually recommended by Nintendo. 32 games are listed as of writing, and the selection is quite varied: Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Last Day of June, Flint Hook, FAST RMX… Unfortunately, it’s not clear how those games were selected, and how often the selection of Featured games will be updated.
In Europe, Nintendo actually indicates why a specific game was selected: because it has a free demo, because you can share a Joy-Con with a friend, because it’s a multiplayer focused game, etc..
But this is not the only change made to the Nintendo eShop of the Nintendo Switch today. Now, the list of best-sellers is divided in two categories:
- All Games (includes digital-only + digital version of games available at retail)
- Download-Only Games (includes digital-only games)
Right now, it’s not clear what happens to digital-only games that end up getting a retail release after their launch on the Nintendo eShop…
While those two changes are pretty welcome, it’s clear there’s still more than needs and can be done about discoverability on the Nintendo eShop. After all, this is a never-ending issue that all digital store fronts have to deal with!
Source: Nintendo eShop
