eShopperReviews.com Nintendo Switch 2 Wishlist

We can all sense it in the air, even without the official announcement of a reveal coming this fiscal year – the Nintendo Switch’s successor is coming. And while many videogame websites have revealed their wishlists for this unannounced hardware, at eShopperReviews we’re going to approach this topic differently.

First, we’re going to assume, just for the sake of the discussion, that we are in fact talking about a Nintendo Switch 2 and not some other Nintendo hardware. Yes, it’s entirely possible that Nintendo’s next hardware could be something bizarre and off-the-wall, or something more like a traditional console or handheld, we’re going to make the assumption here that this will in fact be a Nintendo Switch 2, a hybrid platform that is largely similar to the Nintendo Switch.

Second, we’re going to skip over all the usual suspects. Yes, we too want it to be more powerful, with better performance, a nicer screen, a better eShop, and no more analog stick drift. But those are the things every videogame website is asking for. What follows are the wishlist requests specific to eShopperReviews, that affect this website (and specifically me, Jake McNeill). All those other things are a given, but I feel like these eleven issues are far less talked about. What do I mean? Well, just read on…

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Wish #1: Fix the 2000-Icon Limitation

Most gamers will never experience this problem, but it is a constant pain in my side. When you have over 2000 icons in your game library on Nintendo Switch, it does something very strange. At this point, game icons start disappearing from your game library. Now to be clear, I’m saying “icons”, because it doesn’t matter whether or not you have archived these games. Heck, it doesn’t matter if these are physical cartridges that the Nintendo Switch keeps in your library’s icons after you’ve popped the cartridge out – each one of these adds to your icon list, and once it passes 2000, they start disappearing.

By “disappearing”, I do not mean that they are deleted off of your Nintendo Switch. Oh no, that would be preferable. Instead, they are shunted off to some limbo realm where you cannot see it and cannot play it, but neither can you delete it or redownload it. You are just permanently stuck without the ability to access this game until you start deleting games off of your Nintendo Switch (again, deleting, not archiving, because archived games keep their icon in your Nintendo Switch’s library). What’s worse, you don’t even know what you’re missing until you go looking for a game you know you own and cannot find it.

I have currently reviewed over 3,000 Nintendo Switch games, and I have purchased over 4,000. So this means that over half of the games I have purchased are completely inaccessible, even if I have room on my MicroSD card to store them. Heck, no fewer than 1000 games that I have already reviewed are inaccessible, either deleted by me because of this problem or spirited off to Nintendo’s icon nether-realm.

If the Nintendo Switch is fully backwards-compatible (more on this later), such a problem will only get worse in the next generation, as Nintendo Switch games and Nintendo Switch 2 games will compete for this icon territory. And while very few players have to deal with this now, that number will grow as more players hit this invisible roof and start to find their games missing… that is, unless Nintendo fixes this problem.

Not only do I feel like this isn’t asking for much, I’m frustrated I even have to ask: Nintendo, when you release the Nintendo Switch 2, please let me play the games I’ve bought and played for.

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Wish #2: Fix the way icons are displayed in your game library

Is this the same issue as Wish #1? I don’t care, as long as it’s addressed. Right now, scrolling through my game library is a torturous endeavor, particularly because there’s no search function, and very little in the way of organization options (save for the folders added late into the Nintendo Switch’s life).

However, even just scrolling through icons is a chore, because they take forever to load. It’s the same as when you’re on your PC and scrolling through a folder full of thousands of images – it takes them a few seconds to load sometimes. Well, on the Nintendo Switch, it can take a half a minute sometimes for me. It’s really frustrating, and if a “next gen” platform still does this, well, it won’t feel very next-gen.

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Wish #3: Fix the memory management menus

The game icons taking forever to load is frustrating, but this is far, far worse. If I want to delete a game save, I have to wait 2-5 minutes for the list of game saves to load. Then I delete the save file, and I have to wait another 2-5 minutes to delete the next one. I have spent entire days deleting save files off of my Nintendo Switch, just because it takes so long to do it.

All these issues, I know, are because I have just so very many games… but so what? Nintendo is basically punishing players for spending more money on their game platform. What kind of sense does that make!?

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Wish #4: Stop forcing players to save things to internal memory

Again, piggybacking off the last one, it’s great that I can expand my Nintendo Switch’s memory using a 1.5TB MicroSD card. It’s still not enough to hold all the games I have, but it helps a lot. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of stuff that Nintendo will not let you save to a MicroSD card at all, meaning that if you’re cluttering up your internal memory, your only option to get more space is delete something, even if you have plenty of space on your MicroSD card.

This is each and every game save you have, which Nintendo Switch forces to be saved on the internal memory. But it’s also select games that for some reason Nintendo requires to be there as well. And while I get that Nintendo is controlling and doesn’t want players altering data, surely there must be better ways to do it than this.

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Wish #5: Don’t be jerks with backwards-compatibility

Getting away from menus, Nintendo has thankfully confirmed that Nintendo Switch’s successor will have backwards-compatibility of some sort, but… what, exactly? Will it only be select games? Will you be forced to pay a fee to bring your games over, like Wii U did with Wii Virtual Console games? Will there be some other absurd hoops you have to jump through just to play your games that you bought with your money?

So this wish is… I don’t want any of that crap. Just let the Nintendo Switch 2 play all of the games in your Nintendo Switch library, full stop. No fees, no limitations, no weird “but you have to do a bunch of frustrating stuff to make it work”, none of that. Just let us play our games.

Oh, and why does this matter so much to me? Well, when you buy 4,000 games, it’s kinda’ important to ensure I don’t have to buy them all again.

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Wish #6: If you enhance Nintendo Switch games in any way on Nintendo Switch 2, let it be something you can easily turn on and off

I know a lot of people are hoping Nintendo Switch 2 will let them play Nintendo Switch games with graphical or performance enhancements, especially with performance issues you see in more and more games on Nintendo Switch. Maybe they’ll have these, maybe they won’t, maybe they’ll have them and charge for them, I don’t know. But my wish is: If they do this, I want it to be something I can easily switch on and off.

Why? Well, because I review Nintendo Switch games, of course. And it’ll be nice for me to compare and contrast the performance differences between different versions of the game without having to go back to my original Nintendo Switch. Surely that should be easy enough to implement, right?

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Wish #7: Don’t ditch physical media… but make the cartridges cheaper

This might seem like a strange request for a website focused mainly on digital games, but I feel both digital and physical games play an important role in the videogame market. Digital games are convenient and immediately accessible, while Physical games give players a greater degree of ownership, the ability to lend to others, or sell to a reseller.

But physical games also do something else vital – they play an important role in ensuring that digital game prices are not artificially inflated, as unlike digital games they are still subject to the laws of supply and demand. If people refuse to buy a physical game because it’s too expensive, its price is usually reduced, and digital games must go down in price as well or people will just buy physical releases instead.

Okay, well… that’s not how things played out during the Nintendo Switch era, because game cartridges were too expensive, which inflated the price of physical games, which in turn inflated the price of digital games. This was a major contributor to the “Switch tax” many gamers complained about. In Nintendo’s next generation, I strongly feel that they need to find a way to cut this cost, or we’ll be dealing with the “Switch tax” all over again…

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Wish #8: Find better memory solutions

The digital version of NBA 2K24 Kobe Bryant Edition takes up 59.2GB of memory on Nintendo Switch. That is more memory than the launch Nintendo Switch came with, and it’s nearly all of the memory the Nintendo Switch OLED has. One digital game, that’s all it takes to sap up all the memory on the Nintendo Switch, one.

This does, of course, create another good argument for physical games, and you can of course expand your memory with a MicroSD card, but why are we looking for workarounds to play the digital version of one game?

The thing is, that’s just the biggest file size of a Nintendo Switch game. Games on other platforms are much bigger, and if we assume that Nintendo Switch 2 will be at least somewhat closer in its capabilities, its games’ file sizes will surely grow too.

For example, look at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023). The PC release of this game is 150GB, roughly two and a half times the size of Nintendo Switch’s internal memory. And even if you get the biggest MicroSD card on the market (currently 2TB), you’ll only be able to fit 14 games like this on that card before it’s filled up. And videogames are only going to get bigger as years pass.

Nintendo Switch game developers have managed to squeeze file sizes down to more manageable amounts, but there’s only so much of this that can be done before you start to compromise the game’s quality, and some game developers and publishers may well simply decide it’s not worth it.

What’s the solution? Multiple MicroSD ports? The ability to use an interchangeable laptop HDD? I don’t quite know, but I strongly feel like Nintendo needs to do something to address this issue.

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Wish #9: Continue whatever you’re doing with indie game makers

One of the keys to success for Nintendo Switch has been the way it has clicked with indie game developers and publishers. Whatever you’re doing there, keep doing it, it’s clearly working.

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Wish #10: Address the way game companies are gaming the eShop

Yes, everyone wants Nintendo to fix the slow, clunky eShop, but I think it’s just as important that they stop the abuse going on in the eShop – game companies listing the same game fifty different times with different configurations of free DLC that only exists to enable this sort of thing, asset flips, games using screenshots that clearly do not reflect the actual game…

All it would take would be a few rule changes and some simple moderation, and it would both save gamers the hassle of sifting through piles of garbage to get to good games, and it would also help indie developers who depend on people discovering their games through the eShop to get sales and hopefully build word-of-mouth.

Oh, and bringing back a user ratings system would be nice too…

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Wish #11: Stop limiting the number of controllers that can be paired to the console at once

I’m not talking about making it so games support more than four local players (or eight with Joy-Cons), I’m talking about the fact that when I connect a new controller to the Nintendo Switch to test it, it deletes the pairing info for one of my other controllers, which now needs to be paired again.

This probably doesn’t affect many gamers, but it is a regular frustration for me now that I review controllers, and I don’t see any good reason why the Nintendo Switch does this at all. Does it do this to save memory space with whatever tiny amount of information is stored on the Nintendo Switch for pairing? Is it to prevent some sort of hypothetical cheating or something? Whatever it is, it’s not necessary, and it makes things more difficult for me, so stop it.

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Wish #12: Allow players better access to their own stats

You know how at the end of every year, Nintendo shows what games players played the most that year? Why can’t we see those stats all year? Why do I need to enable family mode and look in the phone app to see some playtime breakdown stats? Why do we get rough estimates of playtime for games instead of accurate numbers? Why don’t we get playtime numbers until a week after we start playing? All these choices are so arbitrary, and it’s just keeping gamers from seeing information about themselves. Why omit this? It’s like Nintendo is addicted to being withholding.

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So those are my wishes for the Nintendo Switch 2 (you know, in addition to more powerful hardware, better performance, a better eShop, no analog stick drift). What do you think? Do any of these complaints speak to you? What do you want to see in the Nintendo Switch 2? Leave a comment below to tell us!

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5 responses to “eShopperReviews.com Nintendo Switch 2 Wishlist”

  1. Jared Avatar
    Jared

    I think you’re right that most people won’t consider these items in their Switch 2 wishlists (I know I wouldn’t have), but it is interesting to see your perspective as a “power user” of the platform, so to speak.

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  2. Jared Avatar
    Jared

    I relate most to your Wish #9 (“Continue whatever you’re doing with indie game makers”), and I agree strongly. I do think, however, that it’s a symbiotic relationship. The Switch and Nintendo get boosted by the presence of high quality indie titles that still run well on the system because they’re smaller or less resource intensive than modern AAA titles; Indie developers go out of their way to publish on Switch because it has an absolutely massive install base and they know it will get more eyes and hands on their games. In theory, this relationship should continue, but I don’t know how much of it is in Nintendo’s direct control or how much of the current situation is due to some intentional action on their part.

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  3. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    Lots of your wishes on optimization (icon list, save file, game sizes) piques my interest as a programmer. They clearly have a time complexity issue on their hand, as my console (which has hundreds of games installed) only takes a second or two on loading. It doesn’t scale linearly, if the situation is as you described. Unfortunately, your usecase is very much on the edge, and it is unlikely that they will go out of the way to optimize it. Wishes 1, 2, and 3 are thus unlikely.

    Most of the hardware specification was already leaked and suffice it to say that while the performance will be (massively) boosted, nothing much will change under the hood. A significantly bigger internal storage capacity should mitigate Wish 4, but as the size of the game continues to grow, the effect remains uncertain. Optimiation remains the key, and if some developers continue to overlook it (looking at you Ubisoft) and gamers continue to pay for it, nothing will change.

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    1. eShopperReviews Avatar
      eShopperReviews

      >Lots of your wishes on optimization (icon list, save file, game sizes) piques my interest as a programmer. They clearly have a time complexity issue on their hand, as my console (which has hundreds of games installed) only takes a second or two on loading. It doesn’t scale linearly, if the situation is as you described. Unfortunately, your usecase is very much on the edge, and it is unlikely that they will go out of the way to optimize it. Wishes 1, 2, and 3 are thus unlikely.

      Yeah, I can definitely see this being the case, which is funny, since I’ve undoubtedly spent more money in the Nintendo Switch ecosystem than a random sampling of fifty of their customers combined… maybe more, I dunno, it’s not like I have access to their usage and sales stats to do anything more than pull numbers out of my rear end.

      But yeah, being an edge cases does make me unlikely to receive a focus from their developers when those same developers could be put to work on features that could potentially attract new customers or entice current customers to spend more money on the system… well, unless any of these issues was an easy fix, somehow. I suppose it’s a cost/benefit analysis thing, and I have no idea how that shakes out on Nintendo’s next platform, since I don’t know how much of the current platform’s underlying structure is being brought directly over… and honestly even if I did, I don’t have the technical know-how to be able to assess what that means for this issue.

      In other words, if you’re a programmer, I suspect you have a better read on this than I do.

      > Most of the hardware specification was already leaked and suffice it to say that while the performance will be (massively) boosted, nothing much will change under the hood. A significantly bigger internal storage capacity should mitigate Wish 4, but as the size of the game continues to grow, the effect remains uncertain. Optimiation remains the key, and if some developers continue to overlook it (looking at you Ubisoft) and gamers continue to pay for it, nothing will change.

      Personally, I’m not paying much attention to reports and leaks coming out right now. I know a lot of them mirror each other, but that’s happened before and nothing came of it. And it’s possible everyone is operating off of the same outdated information for all we know. I prefer not to make assumptions until Nintendo themselves speaks up… and even then there’s always a possibility that things could still change. Remember when the Nintendo DS was a “third platform” in addition to the consoles and handhelds, and not simply a successor to the GBA (clearly hedging bets)?

      Of course, we’ve seen bigger examples from the other platform-holders: PlayStation 3’s controller, Xbox One’s Kinect and always-online requirements, and so on…

      Of course, I don’t know better than anyone what’s coming, but I do feel like I’m being somewhat more responsible than most in actually *admitting* I don’t know.

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      1. Tom Avatar
        Tom

        Personally, I’m not paying much attention to reports and leaks coming out right now. I know a lot of them mirror each other, but that’s happened before and nothing came of it. And it’s possible everyone is operating off of the same outdated information for all we know. I prefer not to make assumptions until Nintendo themselves speaks up… and even then there’s always a possibility that things could still change.

        I agree, things can definitely change as they progress, but some things never change – the need for more storage, processing power, etc. And moreso, how to work within the constraint.

        My worry is that a beefier machine might create complacency among developers, when it comes to optimization. Why optimize further when it already runs 60FPS? Even though if the same optimization level from the switch is applied, it could run 120?

        Unless we are talking about those who are obsessed with optimization (ex. shin’en multimedia) pretty much everyone else will suffer from this complacency, if history is anything to go by.

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