Nintendo developers are facing "big limitations" from working at home, and the company is expecting it to have a "large impact" because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Nintendo Devs Are Dealing with The Same Problems As Other Office Workforces Working-from-Home
It's all because of the global pandemic that's been plaguing everything and everyone around that even giants in their respective industries are affected, just like Nintendo. Developers all around the world are starting to work from the comfort of their homes, rather than choose to be with their colleagues in the office. So far, working at home is not the easiest of options for a developer.
Nintendo's president Shuntaro Furukawa said in the company's latest earnings briefing for its developers, and studio partners are already facing "big limitations" that involve working from home. And the company is expected that due to that, it will have a "large impact" on their business.
Furukawa had this to say, "Since there are indeed big limitations on what can be done from home, we do think this will have a large impact,"
Nintendo has development partners and development offices not just in Japan but all over the world. The first locations to be affected were the offices in Europe and America, where working from home started early. Then our offices in Japan also switched to working from home. In the case of Japan, this had a major impact on development because we did not already have a remote development environment in place."
Furukawa also stressed out that Nintendo's teams that work from home are "gradually gaining experience" and now adheres to best-practices from the new work at the home environment the gaming giant is pushing for their employees. Furukawa also didn't forget to mention to his investors and analysts that from whatever impact there will be on gaming development, "may potentially increase" as workers may choose to stay home longer and work from home than risk going to work in offices, this might be the new norm.
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Nintendo Comes Prepared
Nintendo already said that they are expecting both games and hardware sales will go down given the current crisis the world is facing. The company expects to be able to sell off over 19 million units of Switch consoles during the fiscal year, which previous estimates showed it could sell for 21.03 million before the pandemic happened. As for the games of Nintendo, they expect it to fall to 140 million than their previous estimates of over 168.72 million for this year alone.
Despite the loss they're expected to take, Nintendo hasn't announced any delay for its upcoming games or hardware which can be taken as a win for the company as well as for us consumers. Nintendo isn't the only one facing negative impacts on their business due to COVID-19 but other big companies like Microsoft and Sony, despite that both companies still expect to maintain the release of their next-gen consoles to be released before the holiday this year.
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