Smash Creator Sakurai Warns AI Games Will Be Mostly 'Unplayable'

Masahiro Sakurai, the director behind Super Smash Bros. and the creator of Kirby, thinks AI is about to bury games in copies. In an interview with Japanese outlet Denfaminico Gamer, translated by Nintendo Everything, he pointed at Steam's release count and predicted that AI-made games will push it even higher, and that "Most of them will end up unplayable." The comments hit the same week that Steam Next Fest got called out for being swamped with low-effort, AI-assisted demos.

What Sakurai said about AI games

• The numbers: Steam went from roughly 275 releases in 2010 to over 19,000 a year now, as Kotaku summarized. Sakurai said, "I think that number will only grow from now on."
• The prediction: he expects "the vast majority" of AI-made games to be direct copies of games players have already seen.
• The limit: AI could study and imitate a game like Shadow of the Colossus, he said, but it "would not be able to create whatever Ueda himself will create," meaning the next idea from director Fumito Ueda.
• The backdrop: at the Tokyo Game Show awards, Sakurai ended his Game Designers Award after 16 years and warned that an industry that stops chasing originality "will only die slowly."

The flood is already here

This isn't a far-off worry. On October 20, Kotaku's Zack Zwiezen wrote that the current Steam Next Fest is overwhelmed with demos that look like quick AI or vibe-coded projects, with some developers openly disclosing heavy AI use. Per Game Discover numbers cited there, Next Fest went from about 900 demos in October 2023 to around 4,300 this June, and thousands more this month.

Studios are leaning in too. A new report from consultancy Vivrato, which polled 101 industry professionals between April and September, found 97% had used AI in some form and 94% used it in at least one stage of production. But 52% rated how deeply AI was integrated into their work at 3 out of 10 or lower. Lots of experimenting, not a lot of finished craft yet.

The 2nd Shift take

Sakurai isn't a guy yelling at clouds. He's spent decades on games built around systems nobody had seen before, and he's admitting the uncomfortable part: originality doesn't reliably sell. That's why the AI flood is dangerous. If storefronts reward volume and familiar tags, cheap clones win the algorithm and the weird, new stuff gets buried. AI as a tool for small teams can be a good thing. AI as a copy machine is how you get 20,000 games a year and nothing worth playing. For players, the answer is to get louder about the originals you love. For creators, it's to make the thing only you could make.

Building something of your own? Take the CRAFTR Quiz to figure out which creator tools fit how you work, then come argue about it in the 2nd Shift Discord.

Keep reading: AI Clone Fears Are Pushing Indie Devs to Cancel Game Demos and Xbox Manager: Devs Avoiding AI Are 'Planning for a Fake Future'.

Sources: Nintendo Everything, Kotaku (Sakurai), Shacknews, Kotaku (Next Fest), Nintendo Wire (VAIA Report).