Animal Crossing: New Horizons blev fremvist under Nintendos E3 Direct-udsendelse, men der blev det også afsløret at spillets udgivelsesdato nu er d. 20 marts 2020, i stedet for den lovede lancering i 2019. Dette fik Nintendos aktieværdi til at falde over 3%, men grunden lader til at stå ganske klart.
I et interview med IGN fortæller Nintendo Americas nye CEO, Doug Bowser, at de forsinkede spillet for at undgå overarbejde, altså crunch-kultur.
"The crunch point is an interesting one. 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."
Det lader ikke til at investorerne var glade for beslutningen.
