Nintendo’s Doug Bowser on crunch culture: ‘We need to make sure that our employees have good work-life balance.’

Doug Bowser, the president of Nintendo of America, has weighed in on crunch culture and game delays, stressing the importance of a work-life balance for employees.

In an interview with IGN, Bowser said, '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.'

Bowser then went on to comment on game delays and how they might help ensure a healthy culture: '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.'

It sounds like a common-sense solution because that's what it is: a company can avoid crunch by spending longer stretches of time on a given project, and that's what Nintendo seems to be doing.

In the case of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game was originally slated for release this year but was pushed back to 2020.