Nintendo’s ‘Animal Crossing’ Delay Announcement Drops Stock $1 Billion

The long-awaited Animal Crossing sequel for the Switch was originally promised to be released sometime in 2019. However, it was confirmed to be delayed by Nintendo at E3 until 2020, and the Japanese company suffered for it. According to Cnet, the company’s stock of Nintendo fell more than one billion dollars after the announcement that New Horizons was going to be delayed.

According to IGN, Nintendo delayed the game because of the workload on their employees. “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,”president of Nintendo of America, Doug Bowser said. “We will not bring a game to market before it’s ready. We just talked about one example [with Animal Crossing]. It’s really important that we have that balance in our world. It’s actually something we’re proud of.”

Although this could upset fans, they would appreciate it in the future as Nintendo values their games and more importantly, their fans’ happiness. If they felt the game wasn’t ready upon release date, but they continued to release it anyways, it would upset the fans even more. A tough decision was needed to be made but overall, it could turn to be the right one.

From the trailer, the game already looks promising, bringing characters to a deserted island community allowing a sandbox type of game.

Along with the trailer of Animal Crossing, Nintendo revealed they were currently in development of a new Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sequel. They also announced the new Luigi Mansion 3, which is set to drop sometime later in 2019. For Super Smash Bros., there were two new characters that are going to join the fight: Dragon Quests’ Hero, and Microsoft’s Banjo-Kazooie.