Masahiro Sakurai has a prediction for where generative AI takes the games industry, and it's not pretty. In a new interview with Denfaminicogamer, the Smash Bros. director said he expects AI to flood storefronts with cheap, derivative titles, even as he insists genuine creative vision stays firmly out of its reach.
Sakurai was reflecting on his recently retired role judging the Game Designers Awards when he brought up just how much the release floodgates have opened. Steam saw 275 games launch in 2010. This year that number topped 19,000, and Sakurai figures AI will only push it higher, mostly with what he bluntly expects to be "unprofitable titles" that recycle systems from other games rather than invent anything new.
19,000 is amazing, but I think that number will increase even more from now on. I'm sure of it. That's because AI will increase the number. However, I think most of them will become 'unprofitable titles'.
He pointed to simple puzzle concepts, like the recent Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, as exactly the kind of low-complexity idea AI can churn out endlessly, the same way Needle in a Haystack Simulator spawned a wave of knockoffs the moment it went viral. But when the conversation turned to someone like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda, Sakurai drew a hard line: AI can only remix what already exists, it can't conjure whatever artistic direction Ueda dreams up next. That, he said, is where human creativity lives.
With Steam Next Fest already drowning in double the demos from a year ago thanks to AI slop, and some indie devs pulling projects out of fear of being copied before launch, Sakurai's warning feels less like speculation and more like a status update from the front lines.
