Nintendo Further Explains Why Delaying Animal Crossing: New Horizons Was The Right Move

As you may already be aware, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the highly anticipated Switch entry into the Animal Crossing series has been delayed to 2020.

In the following weeks, we heard from Nintendo of America’s President Doug Bowser that avoiding crunch was one of the reasons for the delay. In a separate interview with Techcrunch, Nintendo’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications Charlie Scibetta further elaborated on the company’s reasons for delaying the game.

“We’re not going to put a game out before we think it’s ready to be enjoyed by fans. In the case of a franchise, like Animal Crossing, that has so many loyal fans, we’d be doing them a disservice if we put out a product that was rushed.”

“So it’s a difficult decision for a company to make to move a ship date out. We think moving to March 20 of next year was the right decision, because we needed to give the development team enough time to make it the game we want to make.”

“So, that’s been the Nintendo approach from the beginning and it’s something that we’re going to continue to do. We’re not going to rush a game out until it’s ready because we want to keep that quality bar high.”

Taking both Scibetta and Bowser’s statements together, we can see that Nintendo is aiming to not only ensure that their developers are well treated, but also that the fans receive a product that meets Nintendo’s standards of quality.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks well on its way to meeting those standards. We look forward to hearing more about what it has in store as we inch closer and closer to its new release date of 20 March 2020.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.