Veteran game developer Masahiro Sakurai recently had a new interview where he discussed his career and thoughts on the game industry. He expressed his concerns about video game development, but we have to be careful in our understanding of what he says here.
When news about this interview first broke, several social media accounts shared excerpts based on Google Translate translations. As Japanese speakers would point out, this was one instance where Google Translate gave a misleading and incorrect interpretation of Sakurai’s meaning. This is partly because, for all the hype behind Google Translate, its algorithm isn’t sophisticated enough to understand nuances of the Japanese language, such as syntax and sentence composition. Nintendo Life’s report on this story ended up becoming more about the controversy of the machine translation rather than Sakurai’s comments itself.
This statement was really part of a longer interview with Sakurai published on Yahoo Japan, where he talked about the way he makes games nowadays. It mentions his work on the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. franchises, and that he now works for his own company, Sora LTD. But Sora is an unusual business in itself.
Because of his renown, he can afford to work as a freelancer but not really run a business. He gets clients like Nintendo to arrange everything for him to focus on making games. While this makes things simpler for him, it creates new unexpected challenges. For example, he has to learn to get along with new teams every single time. His style of communicating his idea with all the team members at the same time was compared to the management style of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
But here we should get into Sakurai’s statement about AAA game development, as he started talking about how few developers could do what he does. We tried putting Sakurai’s words through DeepL, which is better at translating Japanese than Google Translate, for you to read below:
— In the game industry, game development is becoming larger and more specialized and segmented, while the indie game market is growing, where one person or a small number of people are creating games. How do you see the future of the game market?
Sakurai: To be honest, it’s a bit of a stretch. I think we have come to a situation where trying to create a large-scale game like the current one is too labor intensive and unsustainable. I feel that we cannot continue like this, but the only effective breakthrough I can think of at this point is generative AI.
I feel that we are now at the stage where we must change our scheme, for example, by using generative AI to improve work efficiency. And I believe that only those companies that can successfully respond to such changes will be able to survive in this era.
However, we will now defer to a translation from a native Japanese speaker, who simply refers to themselves as Gigi. This is Gigi’s translation:
— As game development is changing to be more large-scale, more specialized and fragmented, the indie game market, in which games are made by one person or a small team, is also growing. What do you see as the future of the game market?
Sakurai: Honestly speaking, no one knows what the future holds. I think we’ve come to a situation in which it’s not sustainable and it’s very time-consuming to make large-scale games like the ones that are being made at the present time. I feel that we cannot continue at this rate, and I think that at the present time an effective way to overcome this obstacle may be Generative AI.
I feel we have come to a stage in which the schemes must change, such as by increasing the work efficiency by making a good use of Generative AI. And then, only the companies that skillfully deal with those changes will be able to survive during that era.
Gigi also shares additional notes to their translation, but to summarize their points:
- Sakurai shares generative AI as an example to increase work in game development.
- Sakurai refers to generative AI as a potential solution to the problem of increased work in game development at the present time.
- Sakurai does not state, declare, or suggest that he uses generative AI, or has used it in the past.
What we would point out here is that this story itself, and the way that gamers and press learned to correct themselves, proves that we are nowhere near a point where we can trust generative AI, or even less complicated technologies like machine translation, to take the place of human brains. Even at this point where procedural generation is a norm in video game development, we can see the limits of these technologies and recognize the need to work around them.
Sakurai’s statement certainly speaks to a different concern, one that isn’t just borne from the current condition of the video game industry, but from someone who saw the rapid pace of video game development from as far back as the 1980s. This is from a time when assembly programming video games was not only possible, but in many cases necessary.
Without Clickteam or Godot, the education and skill level needed to get into the industry back then was impossibly high. But while video game development today is somewhat accessible on the indie scale, it’s also a harsher industry where the livelihoods of thousands can depend on a single game soaring or bombing in the market. Sakurai hopes the industry can find a solution that can keep all the stakeholders happy, because the current pace that video game production is on may not be sustainable at all.
