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E3 2019: Nintendo's Doug Bowser speaks out on crunch culture and game delays

“One of our key tenets is that we bring smiles to people's faces”

E3 2019: Nintendo's Doug Bowser speaks out on crunch culture and game delays

Nintendo is concentrating on making sure ‘crunch culture’ is non-existent in its workplace, according to Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser.

As reported by IGN, the new president spoke about the necessity to delay games to make sure games developers don’t overwork and suffer in their personal lives as a result.

One direct example of this was Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was originally slated for a 2019 release. However, Nintendo opted to delay the game until March 20th, 2020 in favour of avoiding crunch.

“Good work-life balance”

“The crunch point is an interesting one,” said Bowser.

“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.

“One of those examples is, 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.”

Nintendo announced a whole host of new games and dates during its E3 direct, which we outlined in chronological order here.

You can see all our E3 coverage right here.


Deputy Editor

Matthew Forde is the deputy editor at PocketGamer.biz and also a member of the Pocket Gamer Podcast. You can find him on Twitter @MattForde64 talking about stats, data and everything pop culture related - particularly superheroes.