Nintendo's Switch eShop update arrives 9 years too late

Polygon RSS Feed✍ Oli Welsh📅 June 20, 2026⏱ 5 min read(about 2 months ago)

Overview & Key Takeaways

The latest Switch system update patches out the store's notorious lag, but why now?

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File this one — like so many other ones — under "Nintendo's gonna Nintendo." Nintendo just released a seismic system update for the original Switch, nine years after its release, one year into the Switch 2's lifespan, and just at the point that the company seems to be fully switching its focus to the successor console. (In terms of new, first-party Switch releases, there's only one left: next month's Rhythm Heaven Groove. After that, it's Switch 2 all the way.)

And what did this system update do? It fixed the eShop.

If you've been a Switch user, the eShop has been the bane of your life. As well as being poorly curated, it has been appallingly laggy and frustrating to use. After a while, the community came slowly to the realization that Nintendo was never going to improve the eShop, and glumly accepted it. Indeed, one of the most appealing features of the Switch 2 when it launched was the fact that its eShop wasn't horrible to use.

The new update was blandly announced by Nintendo as bringing the Switch eShop in line with the design of the Switch 2 version (and making it responsive to your choice of color theme). The dramatic improvement in performance wasn't mentioned. It's slow to load initially, and it's not quite as responsive as the Switch 2 version, but it's light years better than the original.

Nintendo Switch eShop - recent releases

The Switch eShop, as was. Good riddance.

Image: Nintendo

To be honest, it's almost insulting of Nintendo to deploy this update in 2026. If it had been released alongside the Switch 2, with the other tweaks that standardized the two consoles' interfaces, that would still have been too little, too late. But it would have made a kind of sense. A year later, it's baffling. What on earth could the engineering snag have been?

We may never know. But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that fixing it simply wasn't a priority for Nintendo. And this is flabbergasting for two reasons. The first is because Nintendo usually has a perfectionist attitude to performance, latency, and user experience in its actual game software. The second is because the Switch eShop has been the portal for tens of billions of dollars of revenue for Nintendo during the Switch's long and successful lifespan.

Indie developers will tell you that the eShop is perhaps the second-most important and lucrative storefront to be on after Steam, yet it presents an even bigger discoverability nightmare (not that Xbox and PlayStation's stores are much better) and, until now, a terrible shopping experience. Before the Switch 2, Nintendo never showed any interest in improving it. It's hard to fathom. Perhaps Nintendo's attitude was less "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" than "if it's broke but raking in astonishing amounts of cash anyway, who cares?"

Or perhaps it's Nintendo's longstanding antipathy for, and painfully slow adaptation to, online life. Switch users only just got decent, fully integrated voice chat, after all. You just know the company would gladly revert to selling all its games in boxes if it could. Maybe we're all a little nostalgic for those days, but it's way past time to get with the program. Nintendo is an online platform company now. It should act like one. —Oli Welsh

eShop game of the week: To a T

Ketia Takahashi's typically quirky tale of a teen stuck in a T-pose and their struggles to fit in plays more like a "normal game" — i.e. a narrative action-adventure — than the Katamari creator's previous work. But it's still deeply charming and not as unserious as you might think. "It’s a simple lesson, straightforwardly conveyed. But it’s not simplistic — Takahashi is too wily, too sensitive to human foibles, too playfully questioning for that," I wrote in Polygon's review of the original PC release.

Nintendo Classics game of the week: Breath of Fire 2

If The Adventures of Elliot has you in the mood for some vintage, Super Nintendo-style role-playing, you sadly won't find Square classics like Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger on Nintendo Classics — Square Enix knows their worth too well. But that's a good excuse to check out Capcom's rival RPG series, less remembered today, about characters named Ryu who transform into dragons. Take your pick between the first and second games — they're set 500 years apart — but you might find Breath of Fire 2 quicker to get going.

Nintendo Music track of the week: "Rosalina in the Observatory 3" from Super Mario Galaxy

I was just marveling (again) at the available preview of the symphonic soundtrack for next week's Star Fox, and it sent me back to Nintendo's classic orchestral soundtrack for Super Mario Galaxy. From there, I naturally landed on this exquisite, romantic waltz which wouldn't sound out of place over the credits of a 1980s Studio Ghibli film. No higher compliment.