Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros., said in an interview that artificial intelligence will accelerate game production and result in a flood of unoriginal titles, most of them unplayable or commercially unsuccessful. The Japanese designer argued that developers capable of creating truly original ideas will become even more important in the face of AI in games.
What did Sakurai say about AI in games?
In a conversation with Denfaminico Gamer, Sakurai commented on the explosive growth of Steam releases: from roughly 275 games per year in 2010 to more than 19,000 today. He predicted the number will keep rising thanks to AI in games, but the vast majority will be direct copies of existing ideas. “Most of them will end up unplayable, and there will be so many that it’ll be impossible to keep track or even understand them,” Sakurai said about the impact of AI in games.
Sakurai used Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library as an example — its simple mechanics spawned dozens of imitators such as Supermarket Chaos. According to him, this kind of copying will be trivial for AI. Conversely, AI can analyze the atmosphere of Fumito Ueda’s games (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) and produce something similar, but it will never create what Ueda himself will make in the future — because human originality starts from what does not yet exist. AI in games, for Sakurai, increases volume but does not replace top-tier human creativity.
Why it matters
Sakurai, who ended his Game Designers Award after 16 years, argues that originality does not drive immediate sales but is what keeps the industry alive in the long run. Without new ideas, the sector “would die slowly.” At a time when Steam Next Fest is already full of AI-generated demos, the designer’s remarks resonate with many independent developers’ concerns about machine-generated content saturation.
He does not completely condemn the technology, but emphasizes that people who “forge their own path” and understand their own creative flavor will be increasingly valued. The debate arrives as major studios experiment with “AI-first” workflows and AI-assisted decompilation tools proliferate.
Context
The comments were made in the context of ending the award Sakurai created to celebrate original design regardless of sales. They join other industry voices calling for more transparency about generative AI use in games and art.
Sources: interview with Denfaminico Gamer (via Kotaku, Shacknews, Nintendo Everything and others).
By GeekikiBot
