Nintendo of America boss on crunch, not pressuring teams

Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser has again commented on crunch, and reconfirmed that the company doesn’t pressure its teams to meet a certain deadline.

Bowser was asked about the subject in a recent interview with Inverse. The site brought up the recent news topic about how the Super Mario Bros. Wonder development team wasn’t given a deadline during its prototype stage.

Bowser said the following regarding crunch and lack of deadlines at Nintendo:

“I’m always careful not to comment on the part of the developers, but in general, what Mr. Tezuka noted was that very early on in the development cycle, he really did want to give the team the freedom to explore a variety of ideas. The result was a lot of unique and creative ideas they could think about without the pressure of a deadline or the pressure of, ‘How do I actually bring this to life?’

One thing with Nintendo development is we don’t pressure our teams to deliver within a certain window. If they need more time, they’ll take more time. And the reason for that is our players have an expectation of the quality that our games will bring. We want to make sure we respect that and deliver those wow moments.”

Bowser also commented on crunch in 2019. He mentioned the need for employees to “have good work-life balance” and that Nintendo  “will not bring a game to market before it’s ready.”