Nintendo talks crunch, wants staff to have “good work-life balance,” won’t release a game before it’s ready
With the topic of crunch becoming very prominent in the gaming industry over the past few months, IGN asked Nintendo president Doug Bowser regarding his thoughts on the subject. Here’s what he had to say:
“The crunch point is an interesting one. For us, one of our key tenants 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. To your point, the community obviously is passionate, is vocal, but we also need to make sure that, as an industry, we’re having those conversations.”
