Nintendo talks Crunch Time and Game Delays

IGN

As the development community continues to question practices that contribute to a normalized culture of crunch, many studios and individual developers have been reflecting on the conversation, trying to find ways to contribute to the solution. And Nintendo is no different.

Crunch isn’t necessarily an easy problem to identify or solve, and there are nuances to that problem based on the variations in studios’ personal practices or team structures. Ultimately, a lot of what contributes to crunch is the inherent nature of game development: It’s hard to predict what will work, what will go wrong, and what will end up being the better direction as identified by creative leads (and, let’s be real: Likely publisher needs, too).

t’s part of why games are delayed so often.

And so for Nintendo, when asked about their perspective on crunch, it comes down to giving their creative teams the breathing room they need.

“The crunch point is an interesting one,” Nintendo of America’s president Doug Bowser told me at E3. “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.”

This isn’t the first time Nintendo has commented on crunch and their strategy around it. Last year, Waypoint asked a series of publishers, including Nintendo, what they were doing to avoid crunch. “We flex through the use of contract employees. We flex in the way we work with our agency partners,” Reggie Fils-Aimé told Waypoint. “Our mentality is we're going to flex by adding headcount as appropriate to help us get over a crunch. That's the way we approach it.”

Neither response is the most earth-shattering take, but it’s indicative of the industry’s increasing awareness and acknowledgment around the issue of crunch that big companies are thinking (and hopefully talking) about it.

“To your point, the community obviously is passionate, is vocal,” Bowser said. “But we also need to make sure that, as an industry, we're having those conversations.”

It seems all too common in industries where customers are the most priority (and I say this working in retail) that they get damn near overworked for, not just the sake of the consumer, but for the sake of a buck.

Smart PR move by Nintendo. They have the last filled with titles anyway. Now if Gamefreak was half as smart. Nintendo has never been afraid to delay a game for quality's sake and I'm glad they care about their employees. With all the games coming out for the rest of this year, I have no problem with Animal Crossing: New Horizon being delayed, for both quality and developer's sake. I love Animal Crossing series and this delay doesn't even bother me.

Where’s that good old Miyamoto quote nintendoboy16?

Good to see. Hopefully more devs do the same.

Wise developers and publishers keep their industry sustainable. Don't overwork the hand that feeds you.

Astral Chain hype! ^__^ Did you see the Treehouse gameplay?

Excellent decision. Take all the time you need, I will be playing this game for 10+ years.

Good thing to see. Some of the stories coming out on the way some of these people are being treated is disgusting. There’s no need for that. These games also just need to be given more time to be better polished for proper release. The amount of games coming out with huge patches is just ridiculous these days.

I did and I'm hype to play Astral Chain! New IP's are always a good thing.

Makes perfect sense, if your workers are happy, you produce a better product, making the consumer happy in the process. Everyone wins in that scenario because your employee wont bounce after shipping saving you from having to acquire and train another.

Other companies already do this, even if they haven't stated it. Good for Nintendo to pick up on that and follow suit as well.

Hell yeah! Every time I see more of it, the more hyped I get. Probably my most anticipated game this year.

What did you think of it??

They all care until money gets tight.

That's why you regulate stuff.

This is why Nintendo games do not come out with a million glitches and 13 day one patches. The actually test them and give them time for polish without stressing staff into oblivion. What a concept.

The delay of Daemon X Machina did help too, managed to get a better frame rate than the test demo

Rockstar should learn from this.

Hmm, What exactly should Rockstar learn?

You mean on how not to do things because Rockstar is as far as games concerned a huge success compared to Nintendo considering the amount of games and how long they have been in the industry.

@Gamerno6666: Agreed. I enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2 as much as anyone but just because their game is popular and makes them a ton of money by no means makes working your staff an obscene amount hours right. You’d think that with the amount of money they rake in that they’d treat their staff better and do things more properly. Nope. The greedy just get greedier.

Oh I think it looks cool :D I like the different minigame/minipuzzle sections. Everything feels breezy, nice and fast and the combat looks cool. The main characters look great too. I like that they have police written everywhere. When I look at it being played I really want to play it for myself.

Nintendo needs to delay all their games and put actual effort and money into them.

I get that the Nintendo sheep are an easy fan base to please with poor ports and rehashes, but how does Nintendo expect to ever win REAL gamers over that actually have high standards like PS4 owners?

Animal Crossing is definitely the only game where they actually do this... everything else has the feel of being pumped out the door honestly, why else would theyt alk about it so much/?