Nintendo Just Refreshed the Switch eShop and Boosted Switch 2 Accessibility

Pop open the Nintendo eShop after installing update 22.0.0 and you’ll spot the change right away. Nintendo has reworked the whole storefront. The browsing flow is faster, the surfacing of new releases makes more sense, and the visual design feels like it belongs to 2026 rather than 2017. The shop’s accent color now mirrors your system theme too. Switch your console to Basic Dark in System Settings and the eShop matches it across every screen.

Locked-down security is the second big addition. The new User-Verification PIN can now gate two specific actions: opening the Nintendo eShop, and authorizing any Saved Payment Methods stored on the console. The use case is obvious. Families running the Switch as a shared device finally have a real wall between curious kids and the credit card on file.

Full-screen videos in News and Nintendo eShop also pick up a feature that should have been there from day one. ZL skips back 10 seconds. ZR jumps forward 10 seconds. It’s the same shortcut you’ve used on YouTube and every streaming app for years. Standard stability fixes ride along with the update.

The Switch 2 side of the rollout, version 22.5.0, is all about Accessibility. Text to Speech support has grown by 2 languages: Dutch and Russian. That’s a meaningful unlock for players in the Netherlands, Belgium, Central Europe, and Russian-speaking countries who needed the feature in their own language to actually use it.

GameChat, the Switch 2’s built-in voice chat tool, picks up the same two languages inside its Change Speech ⇔ Text During GameChat option. Players who type instead of talk (or talk instead of type) during multiplayer sessions now get the two-way conversion in Dutch and Russian. For deaf and hard-of-hearing players, that’s the difference between being part of a team conversation and being locked out of it. The usual stability work rounds out the patch.

Let’s not pretend the Nintendo eShop redesign isn’t a course correction. Nintendo has known for years that its digital storefront was an embarrassment. Loading times, dead-end browsing, an interface that looked plucked from a different decade. The PlayStation Store and the Microsoft Store had been running circles around it. Update 22.0.0 is Nintendo finally taking the digital revenue side of its business seriously.

The Switch 2 Accessibility push is a different play entirely. Dutch and Russian aren’t headline languages by player count, which makes the decision telling. Nintendo is betting that Accessibility wins long-term loyalty. And between Text to Speech, GameChat, and the speech-to-text conversion, the Switch 2 is already ahead of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, which still ship without a native voice chat solution at all.

The way both updates landed on the same day matters too. Nintendo could have shipped 22.0.0 alone and let the original Switch quietly age out. Instead, the company kept the legacy console on the same release schedule as Switch 2. Compare that to how fast Sony stopped caring about the PS4 once the PS5 was on shelves. Nintendo is signaling something different to the 150 million Switch owners out there: keep your console, keep getting real updates.