Smash Bros. Yönetmeni Masahiro Sakurai, Yapay Zekanın Fumito Ueda'nın Bir Sonraki Yapacağı Şeyi Kopyalayamayacağını Söylüyor

Masahiro Sakurai told Denfaminicogamer that generative AI will push Steam past the 19,000 games it has taken this year, up from 275 in 2010, and that most of what follows will repeat systems other games already use. The Super Smash Bros. director recently stepped down as a judge for the Game Designers Awards, and the question came out of that work.

His case splits in two. Volume is coming, almost none of it will earn anything back, and nobody will be able to track that many releases or tell them apart. The exception he names is Fumito Ueda, whose Ico and Shadow of the Colossus he believes AI may learn to imitate, and whose next game he believes it cannot. His quotes reached English through a machine translation of the Japanese interview.

“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’. There are too many to keep track of, and it’s impossible to understand them all.”

— Masahiro Sakurai

The titles he picked as easy prey are small ones. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! asks players to sort books onto shelves, and Sakurai set it beside other puzzle games built on a single gag, finding a needle in a haystack or organising a supermarket. Needle in a Haystack Simulator, which hides one needle in five million pieces of hay, went viral and the copies followed, and Studio Bitdot ended up stamping a bright red “original” label onto its own Steam artwork so buyers could tell the two apart.

I have nothing against AI inside a studio pipeline, and the raw release count on its own does not worry me. Sakurai works on the side of the industry that has never run on volume, where one release eats years and a port still has to be finished by hand.

Sakurai put Ueda at the other end of the argument. Generative AI may get strong enough to reproduce something as complicated as Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, he said, then drew the line at what Ueda has not made yet, calling it something AI simply cannot replicate. He added that the people who matter in an era of mass production are the ones who forge their own path and work in a flavour nobody else has.

“Basically, AI refers to things that have been created so far, but it can’t refer to things that haven’t been created before. I think this is true not only for AI, but for various kinds of creative works as well.”

— Masahiro Sakurai

Steam Next Fest opened on 19 October with 8,202 demos, more than double last year’s count. At the June event, roughly 17 percent of demos disclosed generative AI use, a floor rather than a total, since the disclosure is voluntary. Alliance Arts cancelled the Drunken Goddess Reflux demo days before this one began, saying it feared the build would be

“used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before our launch.”

— Alliance Arts

Other developers have pulled demos and playtests for the same reason, and anyone who does ship now competes against eight thousand other demos for the same slot on a storefront page. I think a mass-produced game only escapes that pile when a person decides what it is for and picks the joke, the brand or the design somebody will recognise, and that decision is the one part no generator hands you.

Switch 2 sales reached 5.9 million units in the US across the console’s first 12 months, behind only the Game Boy Advance and its 6.5 million over a comparable window. Circana’s May 2026 report put Switch 2 ahead of PlayStation 5 for the month, with PS5 down 58 percent year on year and Xbox hardware at its lowest May total on record.

Elden Ring released on Switch 2 on 28 August, the first time FromSoftware’s RPG has appeared on a Nintendo machine, with the base game, Shadow of the Erdtree and the Tarnished Pack in one $79.99 purchase. The port ships without a 60fps mode and takes 50 GB on the system, numbers that came out of months of optimisation rather than a prompt.

Pearl Abyss has moved slower. CEO Huh Jin-young said the Switch 2 build of Crimson Desert runs at a level where basic gameplay is possible, then refused to name a window until the graphics, the action and the open world survive the move intact. The studio’s next project, DokeV, is targeted at the second half of 2028.

Ocarina of Time remake gets E10+ from the ESRB for animated blood and fantasy violence, and the listing is up on Nintendo’s own store, though the game announced at a Nintendo Direct in June still has no release date. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess remastered version sits further back, reported by insider Nash Weedle, who says Wind Waker has been left in limbo.

Sakurai’s test is whether a thing has been made before. Shadow of the Colossus passes it on the work it took, with Team Ico planning 48 colossi, shipping 16, and building dynamic loading, deforming collision and a fully animated horse to carry them. I put that game in a different league, because it traded on escapism and on a shape nobody had shipped, and work like that keeps pulling people back years after a trend has stopped being funny.

Read also: Shadow of the Colossus began as a cooperative hunt inspired by Battlefield 1942, with players meant to stun, blind, and rope down a colossus together, until Ueda cut multiplayer because Team Ico didn't have the resources to build it.