Nintendo Switch update finally fixes the sluggish eShop browsing experience

Nintendo finally took the pain out of one of the original Switch’s most annoying weekly chores: opening the eShop. Ver. 22.5.0 landed on June 15 in North America and June 16 in some other regions, and the change players notice first is the store itself. After years of lag, delayed image loading, and clunky scrolling, Nintendo says the eShop layout has been redesigned.

The fix matters because the Switch storefront had become a grind as the catalog ballooned. The store’s huge volume of releases, including plenty of low-quality shovelware, made discovery feel exhausting and navigation feel even worse. In practice, that turned browsing into something many owners tolerated rather than enjoyed. The new update does not read like a dramatic technical overhaul in the patch notes, but the practical effect is clear: the eShop no longer feels like dead weight on the console.

Nintendo also cleaned up a few smaller headaches around the edges. If the system theme is set to Basic Dark, the eShop now reflects that color choice properly. The update adds user-verification PIN support for entering the Nintendo eShop and using saved payment methods, a useful safeguard on shared consoles where more than one person has access to the same machine. Nintendo’s user-verification settings are meant to restrict access to those features, and the new PIN option makes that easier to enforce.

There is also a small but welcome quality-of-life touch for anyone who watches trailers or clips inside the interface. Full-screen video in News or the eShop now supports 10-second rewind and advance controls using ZL and ZR. Nintendo rounded out the update with general system stability improvements.

The bigger story is that Nintendo is still spending time on the original Switch even as attention shifts to newer hardware. The console launched worldwide on March 3, 2017, and by March 31, 2026, Nintendo said Switch hardware had sold 155.92 million units and software had reached 1,528.14 million units worldwide. That is still an enormous audience to serve, especially now that Switch 2 is on the market.

Switch 2 launched on June 5, 2025 and sold more than 3.5 million units worldwide in its first four days. Even with that momentum, the old system’s storefront still mattered enough for Nintendo to fix the annoyance people actually deal with every week. After nearly a decade of sluggish browsing, the Switch eShop finally feels closer to what it should have been all along.