Opinion: What Nintendo needs to do to make the 3DS eShop a success

Let's be honest: the DSiWare store wasn't exactly a roaring success. Even Nintendo's own Hideki Konno admitted that Nintendo, "haven't been as satisfied as we would like" with the download service.

The mediocre reception from the press and gamers alike came down to a number of issues, and with the Nintendo 3DS eShop set to launch in just a couple of weeks' time Nintendo will be looking to right its historical wrongs.

What can the company do to make the service work on 3DS?

Here's what we reckon Nintendo needs to watch out for. If it can address these issues, the eShop may well be a glorious new feature for the 3DS.

It wouldn't exactly be bold of us to say that the developers featured in the DSiWare store were, for the most part, a little bit pap.

When the most popular titles on your service are from your own development team, it's a sign that you need to get better third-parties involved.

Even the highest-rated third-party titles on DSiWare were a bit iffy, including the likes of Remote Racers, Hellokids - Colouring and Painting, and My Exotic Farm.

What Nintendo really needs to launch the 3DS store with a bang is some top-quality developers on board. With Capcom already in action, providing Mega Man Legends 3 at launch, Nintendo looks to be making a great start.

However, more big names are needed to keep the momentum, and hopefully we'll be hearing all about them at E3.

It's not just big AAA developers, either. Nintendo needs to be looking to the big name indie developers for support. Giving Super Meat Boy's Team Meat a 3DS dev kit was a great move, and hopefully we'll see more of that.

Try to name half a dozen DSiWare games. Go on, give it a go. Stuck? That's probably because you never heard about any of them in the first place.

Nintendo gave barely any promotion to its DSiWare store, apart from weekly press bulletins that the press largely ignored.

Even when a real gem appeared in the store, barely anyone heard about it. Nintendo needs to actually give some real promotion to its eShop games this time around, if it wants the service to have any success.

How about some promotion on the main 3DS menu? We wouldn't mind receiving a weekly notification about which new eShop games have been released.

We'd also welcome free downloads of game trailers so we can check out the eShop games in action, and demos would allow us to try the games before we consider purchasing.

We'd even go for free ad-supported games, as seen in the App Store and Android Market. We can't really see Nintendo going for that, to be honest, but it's a nice thought all the same.

One of our main issues with the DSiWare store is how slowly it loads. You'd select the store, wait about 30 seconds, choose to the enter the store, wait another 20 seconds, press DSiWare, wait...

It's a real chore, and if the eShop proves to be no better then it's going to be dead in the water.

Nintendo needs to improve those loading times to make navigating through games and categories a breeze. If just the thought of entering your store makes us nauseous, then there's something very wrong with it.

The interface also needs a complete overhaul. The DSiWare store forces you to press through button after button just to get to the games you want to see.

Displaying only two games at a time on screen is simply ridiculous. A more streamlined store interface is needed, perhaps with easy-to-use swipe controls and pop-up info about the games you're viewing.

In a nutshell, it has to match the App Store for accessibility, or else gamers are just going to continue to browse for iPhone apps instead.

The Nintendo 3DS has all sorts of exciting, game-changing abilities. The eShop needs to take advantage of these, both in its games and its interface.

Where games are concerned, we need to see some ground-breaking ideas going on. Simple prototypes that use the 3D camera, for example, could appear in the eShop, and show Nintendo whether its gamers are into a specific concept or not.

The same could go for StreetPassing and various stereoscopic 3D effects. We want to see eShop developers really pushing the boundaries. It makes sense, given that an eShop release will almost always require a much smaller budget than a full retail release.

The eShop could also signal the beginning of much-needed Nintendo community features. Up to this point, your 3DS friends list has been, well, a bit pointless.

What if friends could give recommendations and ratings to games, or see each others' high scores in eShop games? Additions like this could make the eShop so much more exciting.

Encouraging a group of friends to get involved in the eShop is exactly what Nintendo needs to aim for, and would most likely result in a booming success for the service.

There's one surefire way to get people involved in a service, no matter whether they would normally or not - and that's by giving away free stuff.

Picture this - the next Mario Kart comes out on the 3DS, and within a month, a few extra tracks are available to download for free from the 3DS eShop.

Nintendo would see a surge of gamers visiting the shop to download the free tracks, and no doubt a number of them would stick around to check out what else was on offer.

The Professor Layton games always offer free puzzles after release. What if these were now downloadable from the eShop, forcing gamers to visit and check out what was available?

Freemium titles have also become incredibly popular in the App Store, and Nintendo would be silly to miss out on the opportunity to allow developers the chance to get these up and running, with extra eShop points needed to buy special items in-game.

The DSiWare store failed. Nintendo needs to take lessons from that failure, and from the simultaneous achievements of Apple, or it's doomed to suffer the same fate again.