In today’s gaming age, it might seem like there are only a few developers who won’t take an “easy handout” to make more money. After all, there are NUMEROUS publishers and developers that have taken this track to ensure they at least recoup some of their money back. Or, they’ll take the microtransaction approach and attempt to milk money from players over time. Masahiro Sakurai is not one of those developers. He has made it clear many times that he desires nothing more than to make incredible games for people and then deliver them the experiences they want quickly and decisively.
He proved this once again with a recent livestream featuring fellow developer Hideki Kamiya. The two were celebrating Arcade Archives, which helps republish arcade titles for modern systems. As you would expect from someone like Sakurai, he had thoughts on how the series could improve going forward:
“When you’re at the arcade, you swiftly jump from one machine to another, switching between various games,” he said during the conversation, “But why is it that you don’t get the same impulse with Archive Arcade games despite there being many games to choose from?”
Instead, if you’ve played the series of games, multiple screens and logos must be shown before you can play the titles. Sakurai is against that, and proved it by telling an unknown story from his past. Specifically, when he made Kirby Air Ride for the Nintendo Gamecube, it was originally going to have Dolby Surround sound to make the audio pop more. The reason it didn’t is because Masahiro Sakurai found out the logo for Dolby would be on the screen for a while before ever getting to the game screen and would be unskippable, so he nixed it flat out:
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he stated. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose.”
That might sound like an odd philosophy, but Sakurai has noted in his YouTube series that he believes in helping gamers both get into the title and then enjoy the title in various ways. He doesn’t want an experience that is dragged out in the beginning and forces players to wait until they can do something. Sakurai wants people in the game as quickly as possible so they can enjoy themselves for however long they want.
