One of the things that people enjoy the most about Masahiro Sakurai’s YouTube channel is the honesty that the game maker has on the variety of topics he touches upon. While he has admitted that these are just “his opinions” on how things should be done, and thus won’t be accepted by all, most agree they are good opinions. Some commenters have even said that many in the game industry need to take notes from Sakurai because of his grand or helpful ideas. That brings us to his latest video, which might be the one the entire gaming industry needs to hear.
What could be so important that the entire industry needs to hear it? In his newest video, he talks about the various parts of the development team “speaking their mind” if they feel something is wrong. In his mind, he feels that if someone has something to say, doesn’t say it, and then states, “I knew this was bad all along!” it does nothing to help anyone and will just make people angry.
In contrast, if they feel something is wrong with the game or how things are being managed, they should speak up to find out why something is being done a certain way or see if things can be adjusted or fixed.
Masahiro Sakurai even said that he has an “opinion board” with his own team that he posts for his workers to write on to express how they feel things are going with the project.
But why is this a video that the entire game industry should watch? Simply put, in the last several gaming years, we’ve had titles released that had no right to be released. They were either too buggy, unpolished or didn’t work as promised when released.
No Man’s Sky wasn’t ready at launch, yet they launched it anyway. That received major backlash that took years to overcome. Then you have titles like Cyberpunk 2077, the Saints Row reboot, and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. All those titles had significant bugs that the game dev team couldn’t have missed, yet the launch went on anyway.
Being more open and honest about a game’s production should be encouraged throughout the industry. Yet you can easily tell what companies don’t care about such things and release their games, hoping to get what money they can.
Hopefully, some companies will change their tune in the future.
Source: YouTube