Entertainment

Sakurai Says Originality Will Matter More as AI Games Multiply

Vince MaglayaPublished 7m ago2 min readBased on 2 sources
Sakurai Says Originality Will Matter More as AI Games Multiply
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Masahiro Sakurai, the designer behind Super Smash Bros., says human creativity will matter more as AI-made games fill online stores. VGC reported his comments on 22 October 2026, drawn from an interview with the Japanese gaming outlet Denfaminico Gamer.

Sakurai was asked how fast the market has grown. According to VGC, he was asked about the jump from around 275 games added to Steam, the PC storefront run by Valve, in 2010, the year he launched his Game Designers Award, to close to 19,000 titles a year now in Japan.

He expects that number to keep rising, and he thinks AI will drive the increase. Most of those future titles, he said, will be commercially unviable, and too many to track or understand.

Many of them, he added, will be AI-generated or mass-produced games made with little care. They will mostly copy systems that players have already seen in other games. He pointed to Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library, a simple puzzle game that spawned many imitators. Copies like those, he said, should be very easy for AI to produce.

He also turned to Fumito Ueda, the designer of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. AI might study the atmosphere of Ueda's work and produce something similar to those games, Sakurai said. It would not be able to make the game Ueda plans to create in the future, which he described as originality that only a person can manage.

The reason, in his account, is how these systems learn. AI draws on "what has been created so far," he said, but it cannot draw on "things that have never existed before."

Sakurai's warning is not new this week. Kotaku reported on 20 October 2026 that he had warned AI would bring a flurry of "unplayable" games, and that gaming needs originality or it "will die slowly."

The core of his argument is a contrast. AI can copy what already exists at scale, while people can make what does not yet exist. For developers working on a new idea, that gap is the point he wants them to hold onto as the number of releases keeps growing.

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