Nintendo: Animal Crossing Delay for Employees

Animal Crossing for the Switch was announced to be a 2020 release, marking a delay for the title. Nintendo is saying that the decision was to avoid excess stress on employees.

“The crunch point is an interesting one,” Nintendo of America’s president Doug Bowser said in an interview with IGN at E3. “For us, one of our key tenets is that we bring smiles to people’s faces, and we talk about that all the time. It’s our vision. Or our mission, I should say. For us, that applies to our own employees. We need to make sure that our employees have good work-life balance.”

Given the backlash Bioware felt from Anthem staff saying that the making of the game was near unbearable, this move from Nintendo appears to set the bar for employee wellness. When asked last year how Nintendo would handle the making of a game that was understaffed, they said they would avoid overworking employees by hiring more.

So many accounts from indie and top industry developers talk about burnout and overtime, during what is often referred to as crunch time for a game. Nintendo looks to be a leader in making sure employees do not bear the brunt of a game running behind schedule. Rarely is it the case that employees have caused the delay. Rather, dates are usually set for fans and companies to plan accordingly for its release. It means more stress when a game falls behind schedule, and Nintendo is not one to fall victim to a release date coming before quality or employee health.

“We will not bring a game to market before it’s ready. We just talked about one example [in Animal Crossing’s delay]. It’s really important that we have that balance in our world. It’s actually something we’re proud of,” Bowser said.