A Translation of a Sakurai Interview Mentioning AI
June 22nd, 2025
Edited and migrated July 21, 2025
This article is translated from page 3 of the article linked here. I did this in about an hour, so apologies for any awkward wording or slight mistakes! This was translated in response to discourse on Bluesky about Masahiro Sakurai of Kirby and Smash Bros fame being pro-AI. Please message me on Bluesky if you think something needs to be corrected or tweaked.
Questions from the author are marked with a line, and everything else is Sakurai's responses.
"No one knows what the future holds" for the Games Industry
—- Sakurai-san, your work has gone down in history. In this age of specialization and subdivision, do you think more developers like yourself will come into the field?
If we’re talking about whether or not there will be more developers like me appearing, I don’t think there’s much meaning to that. It’s important for each person to have their own individuality, and the key lies in how they wish to develop that. I don’t think anyone else is following the same path as me, but rather that everyone else is setting off in their own direction.
This may be a bit of a presumptuous comparison for me to make, but it’s similar to the problem of Hayao Miyazaki looking for a successor. Miyzaki-san does work that only he can do, so there’s no one who can follow the road he takes. If anything, taking any path other than that one is the important thing. And likewise in game design, I think it’s best for each creator to make their own path forward.
—- With game development becoming larger scale, we’re seeing further specialization and subdivision of labor, but we’re also seeing the rise of indie games in the market, which are made by just one or a few people. How do you see the game market playing out from now on?
If I’m being honest, no one knows what the future holds, right? If you try to build big games like the ones we currently have, I think soon we’ll come to a place where the amount of time it takes isn’t sustainable. I can sense that we can’t continue as we are, but at the present moment the only effective solution to this deadlock that I can think of is something like generative AI. It may be by making use of generative AI to increase productivity, but I feel we’re coming to the stage where we have to change our entire process. And I think those times will be survivable only for the companies who can adapt well to that change.
—- What do you think about the potential of the indie game market?
The indie game market is another topic. At the present, within a year over 10,000 titles are released, which means standing out is an extremely difficult feat. Indie games’ degree of freedom and creativity are their charm, but that’s not enough. To be a success in the market, you need a lot of hard work and luck, as well as having a work that feels complete or stands out from the crowd. In that sense, even in their differing forms, I think you could say that both large scale projects and indie games need to face the unreadable future.
(Kawashima Tarou, ITmedia Konno Daiichi)