Game News

Sakurai and Miyamoto on generative AI: a flood of copies, but a role left for humans

Masahiro Sakurai, director of the Super Smash Bros. series, said generative AI will cause a surge of unoriginal games, but that human creativity cannot be replicated. Video Games Chronicle reported on 22 October that he made the comments in an interview with the Japanese site Denfaminico Gamer, and quoted him via machine translation.

“I think most of those titles will be commercially unviable.” — Masahiro Sakurai, via Video Games Chronicle

Sakurai used Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, as his example: AI could study Ueda's past work and make something similar, he said, but it could not anticipate the games Ueda plans to make next. Eurogamer ran the same interview the same day under the line that human creativity “can't be replicated”.

A day later, Eurogamer reported that Shigeru Miyamoto, the Nintendo developer behind Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, had made a similar argument: that even if generative AI “were to eventually handle everything, there will always be a role left” for human designers.

How each outlet framed it

• Video Games Chronicle — Sakurai's forecast that AI-made games will keep growing in number, and that most will not make money.
• Eurogamer — two stories in two days, presenting Sakurai and Miyamoto as separate voices reaching a similar view on human talent.

What we don't know yet: neither designer said how Nintendo itself uses or plans to use AI tools; the comments were about the industry in general. VGC noted its quotes come through machine translation.