Quick TakeArticle at a glance
- Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros., said AI will push game releases higher while making "the vast majority" unoriginal direct copies, in an interview published October 20, 2026.
- He cited roughly 19,000 games already releasing on Steam each year as a baseline that AI-made games will only inflate further.
- Sakurai made the comments while serving as outgoing head judge of a Japanese award for originality in game design.
Sakurai AI games comments are blunt: the Super Smash Bros. and Kirby creator said generative AI will flood the games market with titles that are “unoriginal” and often “unplayable,” in an interview Nintendo Wire and corroborated by Shacknews. Sakurai made the remarks while wrapping up a stint as head judge of a Japanese award recognizing originality in game design — a role that put him in a position to watch submission volume climb for years before AI tools entered the picture.
What Sakurai Actually Said About AI and Games
Sakurai’s starting point was a real number: roughly 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 alone. “Although 19,000 titles is a lot, I think that number will only grow from now on, because AI will be used to turn them out,” he said. His concern isn’t that AI will make more games — it’s what kind. “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,” he said, adding that “the vast majority will be direct copies of games we’ve seen before.”
“So Many Games Are Described as XX-Like”
Sakurai tied the AI concern to a trend he’s already watched play out without it: games increasingly pitched to players by comparison rather than on their own terms. “Nowadays, so many games are described as XX-like, or games that resemble another one,” he said. His worry is that AI generation will accelerate that pattern rather than reverse it, since a model trained on existing games is, by construction, better at recombining what already exists than inventing something new.
Sakurai’s own Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a useful reminder of what the games he’s worried about are competing against: per Nintendo’s own sales data, it had sold 38.14 million copies as of June 30, 2026, making it the third best-selling game on the Switch. That’s the kind of sustained, hand-designed hit Sakurai is contrasting with a coming wave of AI output he expects players to struggle to even keep track of.
Not Every Designer Is Replaceable, Sakurai Argues
Sakurai drew a specific comparison to Fumito Ueda, the director of Shadow of the Colossus and Ico, to make his point about originality. An AI model could plausibly approximate Ueda’s existing games, he argued, but “AI would not be able to create whatever Ueda himself will create in the future” — the work that doesn’t exist yet to train on. It’s a narrower claim than “AI can’t make good games”: Sakurai’s argument is that AI can only remix a design language that’s already been invented, which is exactly the trait that makes a working designer’s next project impossible to predict or replicate.
Sakurai Isn’t Alone in Drawing This Line
Sakurai’s comments land the same week Take-Two just made a similar call on GTA 6 on its own creative work — a different company, a different medium of criticism, but the same underlying split opening up across the games industry: some of its most visible names are drawing a hard line around AI-generated creative content, even as their own companies experiment with AI for internal production tools.
| Claim | Sakurai’s position | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Volume of AI games | Will push well past today’s ~19,000 annual Steam releases | Nintendo Wire, Oct. 20, 2026 |
| Quality of AI games | “The vast majority will be direct copies of games we’ve seen before” | Shacknews |
| Can AI replace a working designer? | No — AI can only remix existing design, not a designer’s unmade future work | Ueda comparison, Denfaminicogamer interview |
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Masahiro Sakurai say about AI?
Sakurai said AI will increase the number of games released each year beyond the roughly 19,000 that already launch on Steam annually, and that “the vast majority will be direct copies of games we’ve seen before” — mostly unoriginal and often unplayable.
Why was Sakurai talking about this now?
He made the comments in an interview published October 20, 2026, while finishing a term as head judge of a Japanese award for originality in game design, a role that gave him a close view of submission trends.
Did Sakurai name any specific games or developers?
He referenced Fumito Ueda, director of Shadow of the Colossus and Ico, arguing AI could approximate Ueda’s existing catalog but not the work Ueda hasn’t made yet.
Is Sakurai the only industry figure saying this?
No. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick made a similar case for Grand Theft Auto VI the same month, saying generative AI has “zero part” in Rockstar’s creative work — though publishers’ positions on AI vary widely across the industry.
