The Nintendo Switch was an indie game haven, until it was overrun with slop

The Verge

2 days ago

The first several months after Nintendo released the Switch in 2017 have been described as a 'gold rush' for independent game developers. The Switch's eShop wasn't exactly barren, but early on there was a lot of room for new releases. To put it into perspective, Nintendo announced in 2018 that around 1,000 games were added to the platform in its first year or so. The number of games released each year just adds to the number of games available on the eShop; in 2024, GameDiscoverCo reported that 50 games were added per week, leading to more than 2,300 new games in 2024 by November.
What started as a gold rush for indie developers slowly spoiled, and eventually the eShop became overrun with slop. This pushed some developers to the margins, while platform degradation soured the experience as a whole.
Coming out of the so-called indiepocalypse, the period after the indie golden age from 2008 to 2015 — think Fez, Braid, and Super Meat Boy — developers were reeling from the massive influx of competition and a decline in discoverability. The eShop, for some time, was a reprieve to that. Nintendo itself 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, while 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 to 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.
2020's Spiritfarer saw increased success outside of the 'indie boom' for several reasons, one of which was that Nintendo included it in its featured section. 'More visibility led to more sales, led to being included in the Best Sellers section,' Duperron says. Abhi Swaminathan, founder of Venba developer Visai Games, echoes this sentiment. The game, which was released in 2023, was featured in two Nintendo Indie Directs, which he partly attributes to success on the platform. (Sales remain 'almost neck-to-neck with Steam sales,' 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. It's not really that the eShop has started to rust, just that it wasn't 'particularly sophisticated from a discovery point of view to start with,' GameDiscoverCo author and industry analyst Simon Carless tells The Verge.
'I don't know if any store is free from the eventual onslaught of 'slop games.''
Among Us studio Innersloth CEO Forest Willard tells The Verge that the process of getting games onto the eShop is more specific and time-consuming than with other platforms, like Steam. 'Many games on the eShop are ones that have gamed the system and streamlined their processes to churn out content (slop), while developers who go through the process with care and intent aren't necessarily rewarded by the algorithm,' he says.
But it's not an easy fix — nor is it a problem unique to Nintendo. 'I don't know if any store is free from the eventual onslaught of 'slop games' unless they're highly curated or gatekeep-y, which would present its own problems,' Innersloth communications director Victoria Tran adds.
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. Carless said this is a shift from three-day revenue to 14-day downloads, a way of pushing out highly discounted games that sell a lot. (Nintendo declined to comment.) James Barnard of Let's Build a Zoo developer Springloaded says this system 'could help to reduce certain titles climbing the charts solely through continued deep discounts.'
But he warns that it's not a total fix. 'The new system still isn't perfect, as it seems that the charts instead favor games with higher price points,' he says. 'This means we would potentially need to sell three times as many copies as a AAA game to feature as highly in the listings.'
Game developers The Verge spoke to agree that there are improvements Nintendo can make to help indies shine on its new eShop. Duperron suggests user reviews, while Barnard and Willard would both like to see better performance overall — load times, curation, and search functionality can be an issue. 'It's fine to know exactly what you want to play, but there's no 'You might like' that would get me from Hollow Knight (easily found on the best seller lists) to Unsighted or Iconoclasts (incredible and similar games, but not evergreen sellers),' Willard says.
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, Switch 2 producer Kouichi Kawamoto said in an Ask the Developer interview from April. In that interview, Nintendo senior director Takuhiro Dohta addressed performance on the eShop, too, stating that it will run more smoothly even with a huge amount of games. He added that the act of finding a game to play is an important part of the Nintendo Switch 2 experience.
Nintendo is clearly thinking about the problems of the past, and has implemented some fixes to support the eShop on its new hardware. The key detail, however, will be how it continues to tweak the platform — developers and analysts hope Nintendo won't simply set the shop then forget it.
'Nintendo has made some much-needed changes to both Switch and Switch 2 eShop ahead of launching the Switch 2, but we'd like to see iterations more often than 'once per platform cycle,'' Carless said.