“The eShop needs to be better. MUCH better”: 28 game devs, from the creator of XCOM to indie legends, explain what they want from Nintendo Switch 2
The Nintendo Switch 2 has ended up more confusing and expensive than some people may have expected, but the simple promise of a new Nintendo hybrid console has been exciting enough for many folks as they book retirement homes for their original Switch. $80 games? Digital game card restrictions? Confounding new-gen upgrades? An Astro’s Playroom-style tutorial you have to pay for? I can barely hear you over the sound of a new Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, mouse controls, and the inevitable, endearing, 10-years-late jank of Nintendo-brand Discord.
As we learned more about the Switch 2, I became more eager to hear how game developers are feeling about it. Over the past few months, both before and after the big Nintendo Direct reveal, I’ve spoken to dozens of game developers across the industry to ask one question: what are your hopes and expectations for the Nintendo Switch 2? (I technically asked two questions, but that other one will come up in a future article!)
I’ve heard a mix of mild disappointment, overwhelming joy, cautious optimism, and unflinching demands for improvements. The Nintendo Switch is one of the best (and best-selling) consoles of all time, but many developers see room for the Switch 2 to do more without sacrificing what makes the Switch, and Nintendo itself, great.
A better eShop
Let’s get a big one out of the way. Many, many of the developers I spoke to agreed that the Nintendo eShop is the kind of outdated, threadbare store that gives hot garbage a bad name. Amazingly, I’m only taking mild liberties with paraphrasing here. New Blood head Dave Oshry sums it up nicely: “Mostly the eShop needs to be better. MUCH BETTER.”
Her Story and Immortality boss Sam Barlow seems to agree. “I’d love to see a robust eShop and an ecosystem that supports indie developers with discoverability and a sensible approach to pricing,” he says. (“As a player,” Barlow adds, “I just want CRT filters for the N64 emulation!”)
Oh, you don’t like hentai on your Switch? With bad UI that takes 20 minutes to load one PNG?
Alx Preston, Heart Machine
“I hope Ecuador gets the eShop this time,” says Ape Out’s Gabe Cuzzillo, now part of the Baby Steps team.
In a group interview, Possessor(s) producer Myriame Lachapelle of studio Heart Machine also said, “I want the Nintendo eShop to be better.” Director Alx Preston chimed in with a, “Oh, you don’t like hentai on your Switch? With bad UI that takes 20 minutes to load one PNG?” Preston ultimately called it “a pathetic store. Probably the most painful part of that system.” Narrative director Tyler Hutchinson pleaded, “please write the Nintendo eShop in compiled language and not a web app.”
TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik wants “more social features on the store and a fast adoption rate of the Switch 2, so that it would make sense to develop for it directly.” Iconoclasts creator Joakim Sandberg reckons “the current store has a sensation of just being a slow list that’s added to, which makes it awful to look through and find new things.” He also echoes calls for some Steam-sounding “discovery, features and user-based recommendations.”
Noah Allen, dev on the promising Celeste-like platformer TetherGeist, hopes for Nintendo to take cues from Steam on curation and letting “the good stuff rise to the top.” Gregorios Kythreotis of Sable dev Shedworks is likewise dreaming of “a bit of a reset on the Switch marketplace ecosystem” that “can help surface indies in a more curated way and find a way to filter some of the noise on the store,” and avoid the “race to the bottom” approach behind some previous eShop sale tactics.
Smooth, updated hardware
Specifics are a little fuzzy, and new revenue rankings aren’t necessarily an auspicious start for indies, but Nintendo has committed to eShop upgrades of some kind for Switch 2. But what about under the hood? How does it run, and how are devs gonna work with this thing?
A stronger and more premium-feeling console with better analog sticks would be great
John Romero, Romero Games
Better hardware that’s easier to develop for was another common response. The Switch 1 wasn’t really state of the art when it came out – even Nintendo has lamented its slower processors – and roughly a million years later, it’s noticeably behind other platforms. There’s a reason a lot of games don’t come to Switch nowadays, or run poorly, at least comparatively, if they do. Many devs are more than ready for Nintendo to get on the same page as the rest of the industry, even if the Switch 2 isn’t quite on par with PS5 and Xbox Series X.
John Romero, now studio director at Romero Games, has a simple wishlist: “A stronger and more premium-feeling console with better analog sticks would be great, as Joy-Con drift is a known issue for some people. More RAM, faster CPU+GPU, and 1080p handheld would be nice.” (No Hall effect analog sticks, but at least some of Romero’s wishes have come true!)
There’s a real challenge and opportunity cost to optimizing for a system as weak as the Switch 1. It may be impossible, or so ludicrously difficult that it’s not worth it (especially when those eShop hangups can limit your game’s visibility and reach, wink wink). Will Gwasera, director of Yasuke: A Lost Descendant, notes that “a lot of game developers haven’t been able to port their games on there because they can’t match the system.”
Bennett Foddy, dev of QWOP and Getting Over It fame who’s now working on Baby Steps, hopes it “performs so well we don’t have to care about optimizing. I’d love to be on that platform without it being really hard to be on that platform.”
Switch producer on eShop changes
Nintendo Switch 2 producer Kouichi Kawamoto discussed improvements to the new console’s eShop with the goal of living up to the Wii Shop Channel. “I wanted to make sure that it was a smooth experience, that the scrolling of the list doesn’t stop, that it’s very smooth, pages load fast,” he said. “These are all requests that I made to the team in great detail and great amounts.” Here’s hoping these hold up in practice.
Looking to refine the existing Switch experience, Oshry singles out “more power and better performance and the ability to improve performance for our games from Switch 1.” Maxi Boch, another Baby Steps and former Ape Out dev, dreams that it will “make our game play without having to do a single thing.” Indie dev Aerial_Knight from the Dropshot team also just wants Nintendo to “give us a more powerful Switch.”
“If we can get slightly better hardware, a slightly better screen, and people are still buying the thing they want as a handheld console, especially if we get better performance from a lot of games, I think that’ll make a big difference,” agrees Richard Atlas of Ultimate Sheep Raccoon dev Clever Endeavour.
EA veteran and Romero Games lead producer Alex Mann hopes to see Switch 2 drive the handheld gaming market forward altogether. “With the likes of the Switch and the Steam Deck pushing the limits in terms of what’s possible on the go, it’s exciting to think how other areas of the industry will innovate to cut the cable to the big home setups,” he says.
There’s more to third-party support than just hardware viability, too. Troy Saemann, of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion’s Graffiti Games, says, “I do hope that Nintendo’s gonna get better about allowing third-party publishers to go onto the platform a little easier. Compared to Steam, Microsoft, PlayStation, that’s just how Nintendo is.”
The video game industry needs a bit of a breath of life in it at the moment, something new
Julian Gollop, Snapshot Games Inc
Original XCOM creator Julian Gollop, now heading up action-strategy game Chip n’ Clawz vs. The Brainoids, would “love to come back to working on a Nintendo console again … there’s a big update in the hardware, some cool new sort of co-op style game chat feature is really good. Game share is really good. It’s reminiscent of what we had on the DS, for example. So yeah, I’m pretty excited about it.”
Something surprising
Gollop gets into an understated element here. This isn’t just a new console launch. It’s a new Nintendo console launch. Deserved UX complaints aside, Nintendo is one of the best to ever do it. A new Nintendo box is rare and tantalizing. Circana games analyst Mat Piscatella told me that the Switch 2 has come at a difficult time where people just want to find something that makes them happy. Few devs do happiness like Nintendo, and many devs I spoke to zeroed in that inimitable Nintendo magic.
“I really hope it’s successful, because the video game industry needs a bit of a breath of life in it at the moment, something new,” Gollop said. “Obviously it’s an iteration of the Switch. But I’ve already pre-ordered. I would love to develop games for it, for sure.”
I want some wild stuff that’s gonna keep us excited about games. Hopefully they’re not just done with that at Nintendo.
Andrew Krausnick, Shiny Shoe
There’s a delicate and interesting balancing act between playing it too safe and sticking to what worked with the Switch. Barlow reckons “the hardware itself looks pretty great! A really solid update to what we had with Switch.” David Jimenez, of promising Metroidvania Altered Alma, describes it as “more of the same, but better.” Atlas doesn’t think it will “revolutionize the world,” but it should “hold Nintendo over until their next, more creative thing.”
Some devs are just happy with that. David Gorman, who I found at Offbrand Games via the lovely monster taming roguelike Aethermancer, says “my biggest hope is that they don’t mess with a good thing. I think the Switch has really succeeded because it’s very accessible, it’s got a great diverse library of games, they’re not trying to be the highest-power hardware.” (Near across-the-board price hikes in the self-tariffed US do raise some concerns here, but hey, a new Xbox is now $600.)
Others want something a little more out-there, even if it’s still packaged in a familiar way. Monster Train 2 director Andrew Krausnick is “a little worried” about how iterative Switch 2 seems. “I hear they’ve got a few things cooking,” he says, “but I want another Wii, I want some wild stuff that’s gonna keep us excited about games. Hopefully they’re not just done with that at Nintendo.”
Bethesda and AAA veteran Joel Burgess, who recently unveiled his new studio Soft Rains, just wants to be surprised. “That’s all I want from it,” he says. “I have such an immense respect for the design sensibility of Nintendo and how much that influences everything. It’s been spoken about by Nintendo as relatively little as Nintendo speaks about their internal processes, but from game design to hardware to even the way they run as a company, there’s such a tremendous sensibility.”
Nintendo magic
The Switch 2’s Joy-Con mouse functionality is one standout, Nintendo-grade oddity. As a strategy diehard, Gollop is intrigued: “A traditional style mouse control RTS might work really well here, and also you’ve got at least a reasonable number of switches you can use to substitute keyboard commands.” Oshry, whose studio specializes in making shooters and hating money, said the mouse could be “a game changer.” Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has arguably already shown the potential of the mouse-cons.
Foddy is of a similar mind: “There’s so much you can do, that’s interesting and new, just by having a Switch that’s portable with two mice.” Boch agreed that “more haptics is always welcome. I like new input devices. I think that controller hegemony is evil.” On that note, Possessor(s) writer Laura Michet prays that the Switch 2 and its controllers aren’t too heavy. “I busted my wrist playing the Steam Deck like that!”
Others turned to Nintendo’s games as a demonstration of what the system and its architects can do. Romero Games studio director Brenda Romero is “looking forward to Nintendo’s launch slate of games almost as much as the console itself. Nintendo consistently sets a ‘Game of the Year’ bar with its launch titles, and I’m hoping Switch 2 is no exception,” though “good luck with Blue Prince out there.”
David Szymanski, a prolific purveyor of weird short games who’s arguably best known for Iron Lung, says “my main hope is just for Luigi’s Mansion 4! And that the wheelchair basketball game doesn’t destroy everyone’s wrists.”
I don’t want to be laid at the feet of scalpers
Xalavier Nelson Jr., Strange Scaffold
John Buckley, publishing manager at Palworld developer Pocketpair (who I spoke with at GDC shortly after he discussed the company’s ongoing legal battle with Nintendo), admits he’s been “a dirty PC Gamer for most of my life,” so his hope for the Switch 2 is “more indies,” and maybe a little more exploration from Nintendo.
“I played Cadence of Hyrule on Switch,” he explained. “I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. The whole time, I was like, why aren’t they putting this everywhere? Crypt of the Necrodancer is an incredible game anyway, but Cadence of Hyrule, I just, I’d love to see more of those kinds of things on Switch. I didn’t own a Switch, I don’t know if I’d buy a Switch 2 – again, I just play most games on PC – but for me it’d be those Cadence of Hyrule kind of games that’d convince me.”
Folks like Strange Scaffold boss Xalavier Nelson Jr. are almost painfully relatable. “I don’t want to be laid at the feet of scalpers,” he said, “so that I can get one and I can play it with my wife. My hopes and expectations for Switch 2 are just that I can get it.”
Like countless players, the developers I spoke to were looking forward to the Switch 2, but often for different and specific reasons. There’s hope that Nintendo’s latest wave of modernization will reach some of its dated practices alongside its processors, and while there is an appetite for more Switch-standard goodness, there’s also a sense of longing for the wilder days of the Switch 1’s launch.
We can’t redo the portable console boom, but the Switch 2 has a shot at recapturing that sense of spirit and opportunity in a more dev-friendly package. Now we just have to hope we can actually buy one without being forced to choose our least favorite kidney.
