Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser commented on Animal Crossing: New Horizons delay into March 2020.
“For us, one of our key tenets is that we bring smiles to people’s faces, and we talk about that all the time,” he said. “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.”
I’m glad Nintendo isn’t driving their employees into the ground to get Animal Crossing out sooner, but it’s easy to not do that when you have Pokemon, Zelda, Super Mario Maker 2, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Fire Emblem, and all the third-party stuff coming out in 2019 for Switch. Nintendo doesn’t need Animal Crossing this holiday. If Animal Crossing was Nintendo’s only big game for the holiday, it could very well be releasing this year. However, I have no problem waiting until next year for New Horizons, and it’s great to hear Nintendo makes a real effort to maintain a healthy workplace culture.
The Gamer's Standard 