Nintendo expects “large impact” to game development due to coronavirus

Nintendo recently announced that it expects game development to suffer from a “large impact” as a result of the coronavirus.

A recent report from GamesIndustry.biz confirms that although the coronavirus’ impact on Switch production has started to show signs of decrease, Nintendo still expects a variety of games currently in development to be met with delays.

According to the report, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa recently addressed the situation during a call to investors, specifically referring to the impact the coronavirus has enacted on Switch production over the last two months.

“As a result, we are not in a position to be able to produce the full quantity of units we actually want to produce,” Furukawa said.

“That said, there are signs of gradual improvement, and so we anticipate that the impact of COVID-19 on production will subside to some degree by summer, and that the volume we will be able to produce throughout the year will align with our sales forecast units for this fiscal year.”

Despite the fact that gradual improvement is visible in relation to Switch manufacturing, Furukawa also said that, “since there are indeed big limitations on what can be done from home, we do think this will have a large impact (on first-party titles).”

As a result, Furukawa believes that remote working could “make it difficult to release titles as currently planned.”

However, the situation may improve as Nintendo adjusts to working from home. “Please be aware that the impact on game development in terms of both hardware and software may potentially increase as the amount of time spent working remotely increases,” Furukawa said.

Despite this, a new Paper Mario game called Paper Mario: The Origami King is scheduled to launch for Nintendo Switch this July. The nature of its surprise reveal earlier this week could indicate that Nintendo will overcome the cancellation of E3 in a similar fashion to Square Enix, which has decided to focus on individual game reveals as opposed to a single event.