Masahiro Sakurai Explains Why He’s Stepping Away From Twitter

Masahiro Sakurai, best known as the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros, is working on the next installment of the latter. But he's chosen to stay quiet about the subject, and explains why in his latest column for Famtisu, Polygon reports.

The reason? He's got better things to do at the moment:

"I hardly ever write anything on Twitter any longer, and that's because I think right now is the time to stop tweeting and start putting in a real effort here. If I could put it a really harsh way, I think it'd be better if I could be forgotten by gamers for a while."

Though he did go on to address what happens when fellow game designers say almost anything on Twitter:

"I don't like it when a tweet or whatever leads to needless speculation getting spread around… For example, when I tweet about playing some game, some people immediately get the idea that that character is in the new Smash Bros. Then people fan the flames on it, people start to think it's really true, people get angry about it. Nobody benefits."

Perhaps Sakurai wants to avoid what happened Katsuhiro Harada, the man in charge of Tekken, earlier this year. Not long before the release of Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Harada basically blew a gasket on Twitter, due to the overwhelming amount of petty complaints directed at him.

Despite bending over backwards to accommodate fan requests, nothing was good enough, and eventually he had to take a break from the social network.