Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

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The Wii U shop isn't completely awful, but it's pretty bad. Both the 3DS and Wii U shops suffer from two major problems:

1. They're slow.

2. There are far too many screens/taps necessary to do things.

Loading each new screen seems to take at least a few seconds, and there are way too many of them. I'd estimate you could remove like half the screens in the 3DS shop purchase flow through better UX design. Just compare how long it takes to buy something on either system to how long it takes on Android or iOS.

edit: oh yeah and downloading takes large games takes a REALLY long time. I downloaded the new Sonic game for my 3DS the other day on the guest wifi at a Google office and it took like 3 or 4 hours. It definitely wasn't the wifi that was the constraining factor, speed testing on my phone showed it at like 200 mbps.

Additionally the search is pretty bad. Just yesterday I searched for "smash bros" to buy some new characters, the actual game is deep in page 2 of the results after a bunch of developer videos and other tertiary stuff. Games, especially as popular as Smash, should be right at the top.

Also, filters for available DLC are nonexistent. You can't filter by maps, characters, or whatever applicable content types are available. All you can do is sort by "latest" and "most popular" for example.

You're right about the UI slowness. That is a problem for the system as a whole. When it was originally released, returning to the home screen (for example) was incredibly slow - it's marginally better since a system update, but woeful compared to the equivalent functionality on PS4 or Xbox.

Another weird thing: I have a 3DS and a 3DS XL but purchases can only be installed on 1 system. This is also a problem if your system breaks, because your games are tied to your console.

For eShop games you can call Nintendo and they can transfer the licenses (I did it when upgrading to a New 3DS.) For me the real bummer was that your saves are also tied to your console and it's more complicated transferring those. I don't mind paying 30-40$ for another game license, but it really hurt losing 100+ hours of progress in several unfinished games.

It's like their 'HTML5' browser (on either the wii or wiiu) so slow! The thing is the Wii U specs could have run at least some version of Chrome... I don't think it's hardware accelerated in anyway - prehaps to stop html5 games interfering with 3rd party games maybe?

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