The Enshittification of the eShop

What once seemed like a walled garden now feels like a flea market.

I love a good deal. The thrill of the hunt, tracking a price for an item I know I don’t need and yet still want. Video game deals are no exception, tracking Wario64 on Twitter for sales on games I’ve never heard of, and wish listing games on every platform out there. The only thing better than getting a new game is getting a new game on sale. Nintendo knows this as it sends me a suggestive email every time something on my wish list goes on sale. “Is this low enough for you?” it hisses in my inbox. Usually, the answer is “yes.”

The art of the deal is so alluring that one of my fighting-to-stay-awake-before-bedtime hobbies is just to search for sales on the digital platform of the hour- PlayStation Network, Steam, eShop, and the like. With Nintendo’s eShop, however, lately I’ve noticed something has changed. Frankly, the storefront is full of crap. What once seemed like a walled garden now seems like a flea market. The eShop has finally become enshittified, as its online functionality has become so hamstrung to the detriment of its users.

This email used to elicit a Pavlovian response out of me….

When it comes to art, entertainment, and how people spend their leisure time, I’m mostly a “don’t yuck my yum” type. I’ll enjoy my weirdo hobbies and you enjoy yours. Doubly (triply?) so if it’s sex thing - enjoy thyself, just leave me out of it. Which is why when I am casually surfing though the Nintendo eShop and see something like “Hentai World,” I’m inclined to keep scrolling by. But then right after it is the same game, same price, same cover art, just now titled “Magnificent Edition.” For whatever reason, there are like fourteen versions of the same game in the shop. 

Like I said:  enjoy those games, if you want, I guess. I will be titillated elsewhere as I generally find video games and video game characters to be unsexy. But why must we endure screen after screen of it? It wasn’t always like this, either. When the Switch first came out in 2017, the eShop felt sparse. It always gave me a vibe similar to Apple’s App Store, which always maintained relatively strict guidelines for publication of apps, at least in a way that felt more reined in, if not necessarily safer, than the wild west of the Google Play store. Consumers could feel safe letting their guard down within these walls, doling out dollars at the click of a button in exchange for an experience they could presumably trust. When did that go out the window?

…until the eShop started looking like this.

It’s hard to say, exactly, but the Hentai game explosion looks to have started in Spring 2023 - six years after the console’s launch. St. Patrick’s Day 2023, to be precise, when Hentai World Deluxe Edition was unleashed upon this earth like a scourge. The same game has been released twenty times since then, most recently on August 26, 2024, when Hentai World Ultra Special was released. It’s on sale for $1.99 right now. Dreading what sort of ads my algorithms are going to be showing me after writing this. Probably can’t be worse than the influx of AI-generated game covers I am looking at right now. 

We can thank Red Deer Games for some of this nonsense. As of this writing, they have over 800 games listed for sale on the eShop. We know through the calculator I just had to use that around 2.5% of those games are simply reskinned versions of the exact same game: Hentai World. Please do not confuse them with their other lustrous offerings from their hentai series, including Hentai Solitaire, which I suppose deserves credit for being a card game. Other related offerings include a hentai-themed golf game. Thankfully they have other offerings, including more than a handful variations of an alarm clock “game,” a calculator or calendar application, and some painting games. After much scrutiny, nestled deep down in the bowels of Red Deer Games’ sale list are actual video games. Who knew? We can’t even blame them, though, since this publisher is just responding to established trends on the eShop: re-release a game with a deep discount to stay floating near the top of the page. 

Nintendo can learn about responsible content filtering from Steam.

I don’t use my Steam Deck with my children, but it’s great being able to automatically filter out games with explicit sexual content. There are no effective options to filter these games out, either by name or by rating within Nintendo’s shop. It only underscores how paltry Nintendo’s online capabilities have been - for nearly two decades now. The inability to limit specific types of games or even ratings within the eShop on the device itself undermines Nintendo’s position as being family friendly, as for most parents risk mitigation is imperative. This needs to be overhauled with the Switch 2. Why hasn’t it been overhauled at all in the 7 years since the Switch’s release? The user interface for the store looks largely the same, except now its framework cannot withstand the weight of the world. The Hentai World, to be precise. 

It’s frustrating that Nintendo has let the eShop become overrun like this. Yes, I’ve bought some random little puzzle games that are probably free on a Fire tablet, but those aren’t even the worst offenders. It’s the multitude of re-releases, or shovelware that is loosely titled to sound like recent hits, with artwork just confusing enough to lead a gamer (or their parent/guardian) astray. 

Worse yet, this has seemingly spread from Nintendo, with even the PlayStation Network starting to offer shovelware. Nestled in between Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Astro Bot are now, too, calculators and alarm clocks. It’s taken something I enjoyed - trawling through these shops for a deep discount on a remaster or a hidden game - and turned it into a chore. Please, I have enough of those already.

Amazing America? Why??

These antics have also made it more difficult for a title to succeed in this digital landscape. If a game is not already performing well, the re-release strategy of some publishers, coupled with drastic discounts in order to game the best seller’s list results in a gamification of the platform itself, again to the detriment of the consumer. Publishers spending more time trying to cheat their way into extra sales feels like a lousy practice. As the viability of the eShop erodes, so does a bit of hard-earned trust for Nintendo.

Moments ago, I received a ding from my inbox. “Good news,” the email from Nintendo hailed at the top. “One or more items on your Wish List are on sale.”  I wondered what it could be. Would I finally pick up the Baten Katos remaster at a discount? I instinctively began scrolling to see what was on sale when I remembered how miserable the eShop has become. I swiped left on the screen, sending the e-mail into the trash.