The Nintendo Switch was released on March 3rd, 2017. I preordered it with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Bomberman R.

I remember playing Zelda on launch day. It was incredible. (Bomberman, not so much.)

Zelda took a lot of my focus throughout March 2017. By early April, I had gone as far as I wanted to: beating the final boss, finishing all shrines, and exploring loads of the map. I didn’t want to aim for 100% - so I started looking for other games.

Back then, the Switch eShop was pretty sparse. It wasn’t filled with low quality titles, or flooded with thousands of games that were “on sale” just to beat the rankings. In fact, there weren’t many games at all.

I wanted to have a quick way to keep track of which game were coming out, and which ones were worth getting. This was a lot easier when there weren’t even 100 games out until around August 2017.

I started a list of all Switch games on a WordPress blog, and also created a small stats minisite to aggregate review scores from anywhere I could find them. In May 2017, I merged the two, and started the earliest version of my side project under the name “World of Switch”. I renamed it to Switch Scores in December 2019.

So here we are over 7 years after I started, and Switch Scores / World of Switch is my longest running side project.

It’s been a great outlet to continue coding - I started the site around the time when my day job went in a direction that required a lot less coding from me - despite still being a technical role.

Here are a few things that have changed, and some that have stayed the same.

Top Rated games

The most popular part of the site is the Top Rated section - specifically, the All-time Top 100. But there are other pages too, with a Top Rated listed for every year since the Switch launched. That’s eight separate lists.

Browse games

With such a large library, finding games is important. Being able to browse by category, tag, series, or date, was something I set up fairly early on. Search came a bit later. You can’t create pages like that on a simple blog for a system with over 12,000 titles!

Adding games

In the very early days, all database updates were done by manually editing the database. For 100 games it didn’t matter that much. But I soon created the first staff pages so I could add and edit games without going into the database. There is now a wide range of screens that I use to keep the site updated.

One thing that hasn’t changed much is how I add the games. I still go to the Switch eShop every week, go through all the new releases, and go through the upcoming games for the next 7 days. Unfortunately, there isn’t a more reliable way to get the latest games. There are APIs, but 2-3 years ago, most games stopped being added to those. It’s a long story that I’ve written about in the past, suffice to say I don’t have many better options.

Adding reviews

Adding reviews to the database wasn’t the only manual part of that process. Originally, I visited every review site in my browser, checking if new reviews had gone up, and adding them to the site one at a time. It was slow, and I can’t imagine doing it that way today!

In the first year, I built a review importer that saved me a lot of the checking and adding of reviews. This relied on the RSS feeds that most sites have. However, it still required some manual effort, and I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking it to deal with different sites. One of the more recent changes is a scraper that also loads the score from sites that display it in a consistent format.

Member tools

I’ve developed a few dashboards for different users. Reviewers and games companies (publishers) can sign up to manage their reviews and games. More recently, the developer hub provides access to the API. I haven’t built many other community tools as there hasn’t been a great deal of interest.

What’s next?

I’ll keep adding the new games every week, as I’ve done for the past 7+ years. Beyond that, I’m waiting to see what changes will be needed with the Switch 2, or whatever it ends up being called.

Perhaps we’ll see a similar approach to the PlayStation, where the new Switch is backwards compatible, new games come out for both the old and new system, but games start coming out just for the Switch 2. That would mean continuing the game library, but adding an option to distinguish which games will work on each platform.

It’s hard to know what will happen with the Switch 2, but I’ll find some way to work it into the site.

Meanwhile if you’re interested, you can visit the site here: Switch Scores