Nintendo Just Fixed The Switch’s Biggest Flaw After Nearly A Decade

The Nintendo Switch has become a core part of Nintendo’s brand over the past decade, but that hasn’t stopped the system from receiving numerous complaints over its limitations and flaws. Although the Nintendo Switch 2 has helped alleviate some of its predecessors’ hardware weaknesses and even added some long-awaited features for new releases, it still wasn’t able to fix some of Nintendo’s most glaring player concerns.

Thankfully, while it did take a lot longer than we had hoped, Nintendo just dropped a surprise update that offers a major upgrade to the original Switch, finally making it far more usable than ever before.

If you’ve ever used the Nintendo eShop before, you’ll know how abysmal it feels to use it with incredibly long loading times, scrolling stuttering, and plenty of glitches that make it barely usable at the best of times. Thankfully, after nearly an entire decade of these issues being prevalent, Nintendo has finally put out a patch that fixes nearly every problem we had with the original store with the 22.5.0 firmware update.

Considering that the store made it such a pain to search through to find new games, the restored functionality opens a whole new world of releases to try and sort through, while encouraging players to check in more frequently for sales and the occasional game demo.

Although Nintendo hasn’t made an official statement on why it took so long for the update to come out, fans have speculated that the eShop may have been built from the ground up for the Switch 2 and was simply ported back to the original console.

This wouldn’t be the first time Nintendo took this approach, as similar improvements to the original console have been made for games like Breath of the Wild and its Korok forest performance patch resulting from the Switch 2’s re-release.

Even though Nintendo is offering some hard-to-ignore incentives to upgrade to a Switch 2, mostly thanks to its upcoming price increase, the latest addition makes it seem like Nintendo still hasn’t given up on improving the experience of its predecessor just yet. Along with console updates, the company has continued to release games like Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream that can be enjoyed on both systems.

While this update is still a major win for players all around, it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room that it’s alarming how long it took for Nintendo to put out a patch to fix the unbearable eShop performance until now, which hopefully won’t be repeated as we get further along into the lifespan of the Nintendo Switch 2.

Brand

Nintendo

Original Release Date

March 3, 2017

Original MSRP (USD)

$299.99, ¥29,980, £279.99, €329.99

Operating System

Proprietary, codenamed Horizon

Storage

32 – 64 GB, expandable via microSD

VR Support

No