r/technology • u/Turbostrider27 • 9h ago

Artificial Intelligence Smash Bros and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai says AI usage will lead to unoriginal and “unprofitable” games

https://www.pcguide.com/news/smash-bros-and-kirby-creator-masahiro-sakurai-says-ai-usage-will-lead-to-unoriginal-and-unprofitable-games/
1.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

155 comments sorted by

285

u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago edited 9h ago

If you want to know what the future of the video game and software business looks like, look no further than the music industry. 

Countless artists. Countless tools. Countless bedroom recording studios. Some people who are talented and a lot of other people who aren’t. The ones who make money will make it off of everything else - merch, ads, placements…

Either way, it’s just an ocean of stuff. Devoid of monetary value.

71

u/behindtimes 9h ago

This is one of those illusions of opportunity. People saw things like Napster and Youtube bringing about a democratization which would help everyone.

There are several YouTube videos which go over this. They state that there are more nepo-babies than ever in the music industry, while at the same time it's harder than ever for outsiders to acquire success. Thus, the barrier to entry is lowered, but so is the glass ceiling.

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u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago edited 9h ago

Yes, 100%. Which brings me to my next depressing point: The same thing is already happening in white-collar America. You can see people on LinkedIn complaining about “too many perfect resumes” and AI resume screeners, but they usually don’t quite land on where this is all headed:

The only people who have any hope whatsoever of landing a semi-decent white collar job moving forward will be referrals. AI will usher in the age of extreme nepotism. Medicare Mediocre people holding the door open for their mediocre friends.

And the consumer will feel every inch of the mediocrity.

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u/oldsecondhand 9h ago

Medicare people holding the door open for their mediocre friends.

Medicare for all!

4

u/tubaman23 7h ago

Ronald Reagan rises from the dead furiously screaming "Mediocre for all!!" to ensure his legacy holds true to this day

5

u/___HiHowAreYou___ 8h ago

How hard can it be to take a few inches of mediocrity?

5

u/OldYellersLastHandy 7h ago

My wife tries to avoid it at all costs.

2

u/taedrin 6h ago

We just got a resume from someone who claims that they architected our own product.

2

u/MC_Fap_Commander 6h ago

Even more broadly, some of the earlier hagiographic descriptions of what the internet would be are fucking hilarious/depressing now. Like... wealth concentration and internet adoption are 1:1 correlated. The idea that the internet would be a force for equality is maybe the stupidest premise of all time.

37

u/BigGayGinger4 9h ago

Time to play physical games again. Pinball is undergoing a huge resurgence. Go find pinballs in your area!!!

22

u/Forward_Problem_8982 9h ago

Or board games. Or good video games, if you can find them buried under the slop.

10

u/psymunn 8h ago

Board games are awesome but bad board game AI slop is definitely flooding kickstarter

6

u/BigGayGinger4 9h ago

We have a pay-by-the-hour arcade in my city with board games AND pinballs :D these are slowly getting more popular, although i might be biased lmao

1

u/M4K4T4K 9m ago

Just play old games. There are so many of them, it's honestly not needed at all to bother looking for anything new. I could never buy a single video game again in my life and be completely set and content for the next 50 years of it.

4

u/eightdx 9h ago

Unironically, the handful of pinball companies out there are rolling out banger after banger. Keep an eye out for local pinball clubs where you can often pay a flat entry fee for unlimited play! 

It's also a great way to socialize. I have yet to meet a pinball enthusiast who is a jerk to a newbie. 

3

u/J_Bright1990 9h ago

I've been getting into TTRPGs. There's good systems out there and most of them you can work into a setting you like if you don't like the one that it's presented in.

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u/Shiningc00 8h ago

I hope. But pinballs are hugely complex and difficult to maintain.

6

u/BigGayGinger4 8h ago

This is what makes them more AI-resistant than videogames, which are purely software. Stern pinballs are easier to maintain and parts + instructions are widely available, with service & maintenance getting harder the older and/or more niche a game maker is.

I'm developing a homebrew pinball as we speak. AI can do wonders with the boring parts of the code, like hooking every LED and switch to their unique names and locations in the code bridge between the software and the boards. Linting and debugging, removing weeks of time that are extremely difficult as a DIY coder (read: not a professional software engineer).

But Claude can't cut my playfield or UV print the artwork onto a dozen big pieces of wood for the cabinet. Hell, it can't even make useful artwork assets for the right format -- not that I'd want it to (look how they massacred the art on Harry Potter pinball for an example of pinball AI artwork gone wrong).

It can help me configure my wiring on paper without having a meltdown and making a dozen mistakes. But it can't crimp any of the connections for me.

Claude can't even figure out "good scoring" rules. I basically have to do the arithmetic to try to balance my scoring elements myself. The robot sucks at this, lol.

1

u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago

I don’t really play games much, but I was a musician for a long time. We’ve already been down this road. 

8

u/BotherResponsible378 8h ago

But the thing is, there is a lot of monetary value around a lot of things. There are a lot of bands that are I would call medium stream right?

For example, I never hear neon trees talked about in the global stage. But they are very clearly making a living making music.

There's another niche band I started following, green lad. I doubt many have heard of them. They do Irish folk music with a bit of a modern twist.

I think it's allowing a lot of people to become medium level earners and not necessarily big stars. But if you get to make music or games or movies or television for a living? Who cares?

If that's what you want, that's great.

But, there is still a sea of mediocrity and crap. I don't think it's that you're wrong, I think that there's just more to it.

3

u/OldYellersLastHandy 8h ago

Eh… about 12  years ago, I worked with a girl whose  boyfriend was in a band that I would say is about as popular as Neon Trees ever was. They can a couple medium hits. They still toured.

He did residential interior design work because he could work on the drawings in his laptop in the van. That’s how he made his real money. 

4

u/WilburKitty 8h ago

Yes what we lost was the monoculture. That was sad but the end result is more music for more people and more tastes.

But that was the last few decades.

Where we are at now is something different. Ever greedier streamers combined with AI.

I'm not even necessarily poo pooing AI music. Maybe there will be some genuinely creative stuff that is good music in its own right and not all stolen, one day. In a vacuum that might be cool.

But trying feed me that when what I want is my good real music made by real people is extremely gross. Spotify and everyone else are acting in the most cynical way possible and it's a awful.

6

u/BotherResponsible378 8h ago

My problem with AI isn't that it's stealing, it's not that it's bad.

One day AI will be making good work and it won't be stolen. That's an inevitability. Technology doesn't plateau like that.

My issue, is that I'm not impressed with any of it. It doesn't matter what form it takes, music, writing, shows, games. It's not impressive. I follow the Arts for the same the same way that people follow sports. And an "artist" using AI is just like an athlete doping.

If I see something that was made with AI and it's impressive, I will be more impressed by the people who made the AI than I will by the person who used the AI. I've already seen a lot of things in AI that have impressed me. But I'm not impressed by the people that made them. And as a result, I'm not really interested in watching them.

It just makes me a little more interested in learning how the technology works.

1

u/botany_fairweather 3h ago

How does this take see self-made independent artists that can’t afford big productions so use AI to fill their budgetary or knowledge gaps? Would you rather those artists wait to find capital investment to build their projects, or invest decades into education that enables them to build sans AI? Or should individuals never take on projects at scale like that if they can’t afford to do it without AI? I agree wholeheartedly that AI should not be used to make a vision, and that only human visions are impressive, but if AI-supplementation is the only way to bring that vision to life for the artist, I have a really hard time denying it to them.

(please appreciate the distinction between vision and output here, its a crucial one for what I am saying)

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u/BotherResponsible378 3h ago

Yes. I would like them to do that.

I would like them to do that because that's what other people are doing.

I'm not denying them anything though, I don't think I said that I was. I'm not going to find their work impressive just because they couldn't afford to make it themselves. Nor should I be compelled to be interested in it.

I don't entirely understand the premise of your comment. I think it would be incredibly unethical to try and force me to watch or consume any form of media. Or to respect something that I do not inherently respect.

If they want to use AI, they are free to do so. As am I free to abstain from their work and be unimpressed with it. As is everybody. I don't care about their vision. That is not my job nor is it my responsibility.

I know several people that work in the film industry that have worked slavishly to create their own works with $0 behind it. Those people impress me. The people who are taking a shortcut do not.

-1

u/botany_fairweather 2h ago

That’s what other people are doing…because they can. It’s awesome that some artists have the resources to realize their vision, and some find creative ways to fill the gaps in when they don’t, but still even way more people simply cannot do that because life gets in the way, you get a mortgage, children, etc. It takes a certain lack of those things to realize your artistic visions sometimes and while it does lead to saturation in the market when those gates get opened, you still will have the occasional diamond in the rough.

I don’t see the difference between using AI to accomplish an infeasible practical production due to cost, availability, etc and using something like CGI. Is that a shortcut even when the alternative is impossible? How is the art itself impacted whether I hire a CGI artist or prompt AI? And if its the fact that it’s giving up human labor, what if I learn how to do it myself? How is the art impacted to a point where it calls for your negative prejudgment?

2

u/BotherResponsible378 1h ago

If someone's actually using craftsmanship, that's what's impressive. Otherwise, it's just an idea and an idea is 1,000th of the full product.

It's the same reason why it's not impressive when an athlete dopes. I'm impressed by artists and craftsmanship. That includes writing, camera work, drawing, CG work, you name it.

I'm sorry, but I'm just never going to be impressed with it. Because there's nothing impressive about what's being done. Because they aren't doing anything. They just have an idea and the AI is doing the work.

I am significantly impressed by the people who make AI, but not the people who use it.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Nobody who uses AI to create art is impressive. Not one of them.

Also, the people who burn themselves into the ground to make their stuff themselves, everyone can do that. Literally everyone. That's not something that some people can do in other people can't. Unless you literally don't have the physical capability of creating, you can create. You're acting like they have some magic thing that someone with AI doesn't have. But that's not true.

1

u/M4K4T4K 14m ago

It's not needed. You already don't need a big budget to sound professional and have "big" productions. This has been possible to anyone for over a decade.

4

u/OK_x86 8h ago

This. First I reject the notion that musicians need to be mega stars making millions to be successful. Second by removing barriers to entry, particularly when it comes to recording and distribution, it means a lot more people can make music. Make art.

Yeah not all of it is good. In fact most of it is bad. But more people are making and sharing art and enough people can make a living from music. Not just well connected people.

That's a good thing imo

3

u/BotherResponsible378 8h ago

I think so. I think sometimes people who are millennials and older and maybe even some older gen Z get stuck on the idea of celebrity status as a way of making it in the Arts.

But the reality is if there are less big-named, celebrities and more mid-range people succeeding, that's a pretty big win for society and artists.

And with the Advent of AI, handcrafted art in all forms is going to become more valuable. I think. For instance, a video game made without AI will inherently have more prestige and value of it's actually good than an AI game of the same quality. Certainly, some people will be able to charge a premium.

I forget her name, but there's somebody who makes guitars like that. Custom guitars and she only does like three or four a year, but she charges an outlandish premium for them because they're handmade and extremely high quality.

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u/roodammy44 9h ago

It is hard to find new good music, and it’s in part because we have access to everything in history made before it. Games have the same problem, everyone is playing the old games now - especially with the rise of emulated handhelds and shops like GOG.

In the past there would be subcultures, but those subcultures would be huge compared to the ones now. Everyone is listening to completely different music and therefore it’s very hard to grow out of those niches because shared culture is very small. I can barely even talk to people about tv, music or games because I consume very little media that other random people consume.

14

u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago

Brian Eno talks about this in an interview I’m too lazy to go find. 

At one point in time, media went away. A TV episode aired once. A movie was in theaters and then gone. The fact that we can always reference the old stuff now causes art in general to stagnate. 

People are still watching the Office. Over and over and over…

8

u/Randvek 8h ago

The number of people who have seen every episode of Dr. Who is pretty small; almost 1/3 of the 1960s episodes just aren’t known to exist anywhere. That was just life. Storage costs were real and old stuff got purged.

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u/OldYellersLastHandy 8h ago

Yup. My Aunt was on a very popular game show in the early 1970s - she says.

We just have to take her word for it. I looked really hard for a while and even called the studio trying to find the footage for her 70th birthday. 

Footage of that show from that era just doesn’t exist.

5

u/behindtimes 8h ago

This is one of the reasons I cringe when people say "We're in the golden age of indie games!"

Yes, you have everything available to you. But more choice isn't always better. Is there a game for everyone? Probably. But now instead of 1 game being buried in a slop of 10000 games, you're going to have 1 game being buried in a slop of 100000 games.

The shared community aspect is crucial here. And we're definitely not in that golden age.

It also doesn't mean the older games were better than the newer games either. This goes back to psychology, in that the more choice you have, the higher the quality has to be in order to be considered acceptable.

5

u/Lowelll 8h ago

Its more now theres 10 great indie games buried in 100000 bad ones, but honestly that doesn't really matter because you don't hear about those anway.

It's honestly ridiculous to claim that the indie landscape of the last 10 years isn't fantastic compared to before then, at least from a consumer perspective.

Back in the 00s a game like Braid or Shadow Complex was big news because there were so few great indie games. Now every year there are dozens on at least the same level as those and you can easily find and play them, no matter how much garbage is released alongside them.

I don't know what the future holds, but right now there are an enormous amount of great new smaller titles to play.

5

u/AstralElement 8h ago

I mean it’s sort of like that already. The sheer amount of shovelware on these storefronts, it’s just going to increase when casual coders get on the marketplace.

3

u/SwirlySauce 9h ago

I'm just here replaying old games until my 10 year old PC kicks the bucket. Here's hoping for at least 5 more :)

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u/bdixisndniz 9h ago

Welcome! They call it democratic but it’s really more of a lottery.

2

u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago

More like a monarchy.

3

u/Ecstatic_Log4185 9h ago

It's been like that for a long while now

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u/Atrium41 9h ago

I'm curious how much of Eric Barones income is now supplemented by Merch and Partnerships as opposed to checks from the game.

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u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago

I dunno, but there’s a reason every semi-famous musician tries to break into acting these days: It still pays.

2

u/reality_boy 9h ago

Back in the day everything was heavily curated. You had to convince an exec or disk jockey that you had talent before getting significant exposure. That system had flaws, lots of flaws, but it acted as a way to rank the quality of things so consumers had guidance in what to listen to or buy.

We need to find a modern voice (or voices) that can act as a trusted source for truth. Right now everything is driven by engagement, so there is no incentive to be that honest gate keeper. And on the production side, there is a lot of incentive to game the system (flood the market, pay influencers, start rumors, etc)

I would like to find a balance where anyone can produce anything, but quality floats to the top, rather than money or drama.

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u/Kimi_Antonelli_12 8h ago

It wouldn't hurt if we could go back to a time when DJs could play something they wanted. They don't have that freedom anymore it's a corporate schedule

2

u/IamSkudd 8h ago

The year is 2034. You just got a message, for the 8th time today, and the 30th time this week from a friend wanting you to check out a game they made. You want to be a good friend so you decide to let an AI agent play the game and give you feedback you can relay to your friend. You rarely actually play games anymore.

1

u/divineEpsilon 8h ago

I actually think that one should ask "What are you doing all day that you don't play games anymore?" I think how someone answers could be interesting.

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u/SupportQuery 8h ago

ok no further than the music industry. Countless artists. Countless tools. Countless bedroom recording studios.

That's before you could just prompt for music.

1

u/OldYellersLastHandy 8h ago

I read that nearly half of all music uploaded to Spotify is AI generated now.

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u/SupportQuery 7h ago edited 7h ago

That's insane.

What's even more insane, and sad, is that... people actually listen. There are tons of "10 hours of some super specific genre" channels on YouTube, and people like it. Or they listen without even knowing. I've had someone come to a guitar lesson (I teach) asking to learn a song that turned out to be AI. I had two uber drivers on a recent travel weekend listening to AI channels (one was "Music for Men Who Demand Respect" 😂). My wife has a channel of easy jazz she listens to during work which she had no idea was AI. I recently was in a thrift store where the music was all AI. So on and so forth.

There's a copium canard that asserts people will always prefer stuff made by humans, but in reality seems like a lot of people genuinely don't give a shit.

Given how easy it is to generate, it starts to feel wasteful that we're even hosting renders. Eventually, people will just stream newly generated songs all day.

2

u/OldYellersLastHandy 7h ago

The only thing that gives me hope is that the youth will reject it. They reject the status quo - always. They have to. It’s built into their DNA. It’s why humans are so good at adaptation. 

And in a world where everything feels fake, a person painting or playing guitar or performing a play right in front of you suddenly feels a lot more valuable.

2

u/SupportQuery 6h ago edited 5m ago

I think the 20-somethings today are rejecting it pretty hard, at least philosophically, but I already see a disturbing trend of people pushing back against the notion that prompting an AI doesn't make you an artist, and the generation coming up will never know a world where you couldn't make anything you think of just by talking to a computer. They won't reject it because they won't even notice it, it'll just be how the world is.

In 1974 we had a US President resign in scandal because he was accused of tapping some phones. Privacy was considered a big deal then. Fast forward 50 years and the government wiretaps the entire fucking population, the landscape has 80 million surveillance cameras recording us, and everyone just takes it for granted that privacy is barely a thing. Even things we hate can become the new normal pretty quickly.

1

u/balljr 5h ago

Art has been decaying for many years, AI is just speeding the process.

Look at the art content produced in the last decade, prior to 2023, and you will see a bunch of cloned garbage. How many "50 shades of Grey" copies exists? How many "marvel hero" or "Disney princess" movies, with the exact same story but different characters names? Hell, the amount of remakes, live actions, milking of the exact same story in the past 10 years is insane.

AI slop is just the culmination of what we have been doing for the better part of the prior decade, and the industry does that because it is lucrative, people happily buy crap.

1

u/Existing-Pay848 6h ago

It's almost like a lot of it isn't meant to have monetary value and the expectation of receiving monetary value has ruined everything. Music stopped being a hobby and a skill and became a potential 20$ pay cheque lol.

1

u/caninehere 33m ago

This isn't the future of the video game business, it's like the last 5 years. Super accessible engines already led us here, AI is just knocking it up another notch.

1

u/thetrueyou 9h ago

Where's the issue? If people want to make music they should do it for the love of it. Not chasing monetary gains.

2

u/divineEpsilon 8h ago

People who say things like this wish that one didn't have to choose between making art and collecting those green life tickets.

It's not that creating is impossible, just harder. The money advantage increases further...

2

u/thetrueyou 7h ago

Creating itself has never been easier? I think you meant to say profiting off creativity has never been harder?

0

u/GerthySchIongMeat 9h ago

Good. Users will be able to find and built games as communities. Being stuck with a few AAA game creators that gouge our wallets needs to collapse. Yes, there will be A LOT OF STUFF. But also, there will be some incredibly inspiring games guided merely by human imagination.

9

u/OldYellersLastHandy 9h ago edited 9h ago

Respectfully, I think you’re wrong, and here’s why:

Building a video game - even with AI tools - is a spectacular amount of work and it requires a spectacular amount of time. People who work for video game companies have that time because they’re at work. They get paid.

If you don’t get paid, you have to have a job, and so now you have way less time to work on your special thing. Who will have that kind of time? Rich kids. 

So again, we have the “democratization” of creative pursuits actually making them luxury items for the upper class.

-6

u/TechTuna1200 9h ago

AI is essentially deflationary in the long run. If things get easier to build, you will see a lot of competition. Which will bring prices down on everything.

When you have no competitive edge you have to spend a lot of money on ads as you said.

0

u/AttonJRand 8h ago

You are ignoring how expensive ai actually is, and what its doing to debt and interest rates.

Its literally the driving cause of our current rising costs.

People like you are always making these incredibly flawed assertions were you say just look at the good stuff without any of the costs, anything looks amazing when you skew it that much.

12

u/ggtsu_00 8h ago edited 7h ago

When ChatGPT first became actually usable, we saw a huge swarm of AI generated books hit the market not too long after. No one reads these books nor have any interest in them. When someone unexpectedly or accidentally gets suckered in buying one of these AI generated books, they often refund them immediately.

This pattern repeated with every other form of AI generated medium. It won't be any different with video games.

32

u/Far_Ratio_5441 9h ago

Like 99% of everyone is against AI and I like seeing people like Sakurai come out and go against it.

Maybe these companies slow down the AI race, there’s no rush. We’re gonna crumbles under the weight of AI.

22

u/TeTrodoToxin4 8h ago

Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) said AI was a grotesque insult to life.

12

u/Far_Ratio_5441 8h ago

Smart people agree with that.

2

u/frogandbanjo 3h ago

Smarter people know that life isn't really all that great, so maybe it could stand to listen to a few grotesque insults and up its fucking game in response.

1

u/Skensis 5h ago

Wish that was the case, people complain about AI in gaming, but gladly turn on AI features.

-8

u/Bergara 8h ago

Like 99% of everyone is against AI

Lol go outside and touch some grass. Nobody who isn't terminally online give a fuck about AI. Not to mention every big company in the world is going all in on AI. It will breed a new wave of mediocre games, just like when asset flipping became a thing, but it also brings about the ability to make more and better games for many good people and studios.

10

u/Far_Ratio_5441 8h ago

So people like Sakurai and other high profile names don’t give a crap about AI? Are there terminally online?

AI might have some purposes but it’s not needed, the only reason people want to push it is to win the AI race. Not everyone is gonna get those fancy flying cars that Elon Musk is gonna make especially in our lifetime.

That’s cope and then so what happens when AI takes all those people’s jobs? I guess everyone is gonna be terminally online and you’ll be telling them to go touch grass.

2

u/Quick-Amoeba-1389 6h ago

bzzt wrong

who are you trying to convince us or yourself? go outside and touch some grass.

-4

u/Bergara 5h ago

Great logical arguments there buddy

68

u/Yo-Soy-Groot 9h ago

Call of Duty has been unoriginal for decades. Slop is slop regardless of whether it uses AI. There will be more slop, yes, but it's always been there.

19

u/nobbytho 8h ago

that's because COD is coming from the same place the AI comes from: corporate greed.

we've been blessed with extremely creative and honestly wonderful games from indie Devs.

the same indie Devs now can't reveal their games too early fearing ai might copy and turn out a sloppier version of their game that AI bros will happily play instead.

8

u/Yo-Soy-Groot 8h ago

The indie dev scene was also full of slop before generative AI was a thing.

1

u/HotwheelsSisyphus 8h ago

AI is going to make the AAA game slop but quicker and sloppier.

1

u/zeelbeno 8h ago

Yeah someone might release a crap version on roblox so that the kids with no money will play that instead of never buying the original game.

16

u/mephnick 9h ago

I was going to say, I bet some properties could be handed over to AI and still be very profitable. CoD and sports games feel like they've been shit out by AI for a decade

4

u/Samwise777 9h ago

I am relatively certain nba 2k and mlb the show have not changed a single thing about their core game in a decade. 

6

u/Venous 9h ago

yes and they're about to have their worst year ever.

3

u/slightly0ff 6h ago

Not disagreeing with the statement, but humans should demand something better. Instead we are praising easy to make slop because.. it's a step up from hard to make and more specialised slop??

0

u/Yo-Soy-Groot 6h ago

Point I'm trying to make is that the gaming industry should look in a mirror and go after the slop that's already there in addition to the low effort AI slop.

3

u/slightly0ff 6h ago

Point I am trying to make is that it's a very poor deflection of the actual point, which is that this technology is exponentially lowering our collective intelligence and life standard

21

u/falilth 9h ago

He's right. I dont even wanna wade through the steam next fest demo list with how full of ai slop it is and thats such a shame. I wanna find weird human only made games and support them only.

5

u/CartographerFit3410 9h ago

Water is wet

4

u/scratchy22 9h ago

For those who don’t know. You may or may not like the man and his work. But we are talking about a passionate developper who has produced AAA with AA sized teams and overview every single detail of his games, went to burnout several times. The man has a true love for his craftmanship and the sense of details. His vision for videogames is incompatible with the idea of automated process.

4

u/letsgucker555 6h ago

He also made a Youtube series where he shared a lot of his game making knowledge completely for free and without monetization.

4

u/Jastafool 49m ago

I'd imagine nintendo going out of their way to condemn AI usage in their games to continue and hire/employ humans would only cause more people to support them and only help in their success. Sony and Microsoft take notes

6

u/ClammyHandedFreak 8h ago

He knows that the devil is in the details when it comes to his games. AI smooths everything over so much that you’re just taking a potential filet mignon of an idea and making Big Macs instead.

Maybe one day it will change and AI will be capable of more kinds of creativity in design.

Until then, AI is a useful tool. A potentially destructive tool for many, but a tool.

Someone like Sakurai who knows how to make a good game could benefit from it when building systems or implementing technology but others will just get slop.

3

u/kiwiboyus 9h ago

Put it this way, if you think about something made by a person(s) vs something made by AI, which one has more value to you? Are you willing to pay $80 for a game made by AI?

6

u/some1whosux 9h ago

No worries. We will just buy remakes for the 50th time..call of duty, Madden l, battlefield. Just a different paint job. Jfc.

13

u/terra_cotta 9h ago

there are 24 *MAINLINE* call of duty games.

ai cant lead us to unoriginality, weve been there for decades.

2

u/25sebas25 9h ago

And how many fifa's? How many mortal Kombat?

At the good orinal games como from good original and creative ideas, ideas that come from us.

So there only thing changing, IMO, is that there is going to be a lot more bad games and a lot more good games.

1

u/Existing-Pay848 6h ago

Fifa is a bad example imo as it's a sports game. The sport exists the games are just trying to keep up graphically and gameplay wise. That'd be like complaining about Madden or the NHL games.

5

u/grislebeard 9h ago

OMG THANK YOU.

I was so worried the whole world had lost it, but there's at least ONE sane person in a position of influence (I assume the rest of the old guard at the big N feel the same).

2

u/MilaKunisWatermelon 8h ago

There are already thousands of unoriginal and unprofitable games that don’t use AI. Nintendo should know this, as they list them on their online shop… ridiculous stuff for a shop aimed primarily at children such as Anime Waifu Simulator.

2

u/fixurstuffr 8h ago

Already saw that with Steam's Next Fest.

2

u/RecordNo9008 9h ago

I love my Nintendo.

4

u/clue124 9h ago

Sakurai is the goat and he is right. Nintendo has that organic sauce down to a T and its a disservice to this man to pump out slop. Learn to code for sakurai

3

u/CheeseManSucks 9h ago

Nintendo is the console manufacturer that isn't throwing out 700+ consoles. They dish out consistently good game.

Sony and MS are letting Nintendo just win by doing nothing. It's crazy

2

u/InsaneSeishiro 9h ago

Always good when high profile people in the industry are speaking out against generative AI.

I mean the man is objectivly correct as well, AI can quite literally not be original since it just remixes a bunch of stolen material and most people don't want to buy games the studio obviosuly cut a buncha corners off while still charging premium prices(cus Studios saving sooo much time and energy thanks to AI somehow never seems to translate to them lowering the prices for consumers. curious)

2

u/yOjiMbOoOs 8h ago

You got people using AI to make music calling themselves music producers. These same people that just prompt chatgpt to create something for them and then slapping their name on it.

2

u/SupportQuery 8h ago edited 7h ago

will lead to unoriginal games

Yes, tons of unoriginal games, but also... more original games. I was a professional dev in the Playstation 1 era, and making games for that console was hard as fuck, but we still saw plenty of unoriginal games. Now anyone with an idea can realize it. That's going to mean an ocean of garbage, but it also means the folks out there with original ideas who never had the skills to realize them can now do so. Democratizing anything means more voices participating, both good and bad voices.

I can point to a tiny microcosm where this is already happening. I fly first person view freestyle drones, and for years, there have been a few major players in FPV simulators (Lift Off, Velocidrone, Uncrashed, etc.), and they all cover pretty much the same ground. Suddenly there's a huge influx of FPV simulators. There are like two or three that run in browsers now. That's new, and welcome. I saw one yesterday that uses Google Map data to let you fly around any city. No other sim has done that, but some non-dev had the thought and made it happen in a weekend, because that can happen now.

The problem with gaming in general is that the signal to noise ratio is going to be so fucking bad that it's going to be hard for anyone to find those original games. You can see the same thing on Soundcloud. I've found music from people nobody has ever heard of that I love, but it's buried in an ocean of noise because there are thousands of songs uploaded every hour.

1

u/Apprehensive_Map64 9h ago

That is the biggest hurdle I found fooling around with AI as an art student. It can only make varied copies of things it was trained on. It still has plenty of uses to help workflow but if it is used as a replacement for artists and not another tool for them all it can churn out is slop

1

u/Mother-Attention2600 8h ago

I think ai will maybe do something positive and be competing with cheap unremarkable games that shouldn't be around in the first place. 

1

u/bohenian12 8h ago

Use AI on menial and repetitive work. Don't let it dictate your creative vision. The number of slop games right now that have the similar art style is staggering. It makes me not want to try it, even when the gameplay is great.

1

u/WasteBeing5451 8h ago

This is what AI will lead to in every creative industry.

1

u/CokBlockinWinger 8h ago

The last game I worked on the design lead told me “it will be a race to the bottom.” That was three years ago, and goddamnit I wish he wasn’t correct but he absolutely was.

1

u/SteadfastFox 8h ago

Could AI be used for non-creative labors like whatever the problem with splitscreen games is? Or getting the god damn framerate right? 

1

u/exitcactus 8h ago

Lowkey saying this would keep the situation as it is now 😅😅

1

u/G0dZylla 8h ago

wait so before 2026 there hasn't been any unoriginal or unprofitable game? don't get me wrong i agree with his message but by pure logic most content generated in a specific industry is gonna be mid/unoriginal, AI lowered the bar which means that there is gonna be a higher numeber of "slop" content but high quality content will always rise up no matter the era

1

u/EdliA 7h ago

If that's the case your game is going to have less competition then. If the others are less profitable then that means people are not buying them.

1

u/Zardotab 7h ago

In other words, nothing will change.

1

u/mvw2 7h ago

Unoriginal is key. I don't buy repeats.

1

u/KyyCowPig 7h ago

Unoriginal yes, unprofitable? Probably not. Unfortunately

1

u/Valonis 6h ago

This guy gets it

1

u/Quick-Amoeba-1389 6h ago

well yeah obviously

1

u/franklindstallone 6h ago

AI bros are happy with that. They’re just banking on the web culture of tricking people into slop and other scams to make a quick buck

1

u/StromburgBlackrune 5h ago

There are far more people with talent that write stories that can not program. Think of what kind of game Tolkien could have programed. To me the problem is you have logical programmers trying to make a story in a game.

I think we will see games that surpass because we will have far more individuals that are talented story tellers being able to have their ideas programed.

Here comes the negative votes.

1

u/Pazienca 5h ago

whaaa whaaa crying, games are finally cheaper and lots of decent free games.

1

u/Personal_Employ5225 4h ago

He should look at upcoming games on Steam. It was already like this the past 2-3 before AI but it is now a complete cesspool and no reason to scroll there.

1

u/BlitzNeko 3h ago

yeah….yeah… When’s that new Icarus game coming out?

Also isn’t unoriginal Nintendo‘s entire lineup?

1

u/bobjr94 3h ago

Instead of a few good games a year it will be hundreds of bad games a month. 

1

u/Nutterthebutter 3h ago

Yes, but this is nothing different from other tools making creation easier. People still have bad ideas and pump out trash anyways. Good ideas will thrive and we will have good games made with AI in the ocean of shit that people pump out.

1

u/travelingWords 2h ago

The gaming industry produce a lot of slop without ai. If anything, they are probably scared that people with actual talent will utilize ai to make actual good video games.

The next Minecrafts x100 are coming.

Triple A companies are going to use ai to lay people off.

Good brains will use it to create things they could otherwise only dream of because they work a 9-5 and don’t have a dad who’s an executive at a large gaming company.

1

u/mxldevs 2h ago

Steam and mobile stores are already full of unoriginal and unprofitable games. And new games that don't succeed will simply join the rest.

That's just how content creation works, and generally, running a business. Vast majority of businesses fail and you likely never even heard of them.

1

u/goronmask 1h ago

This guy is on a league of his own. Super smash bros fans know

1

u/Syrairc 1h ago

Yeah... like we don't already get that anyway 

1

u/[deleted] 9h ago edited 9h ago

[deleted]

2

u/graypasser 9h ago

You mean like, if a miracle happens, a miracle would happen?

Yeah, if something impossible happens, something impossible would happen. No doubt.

1

u/ChronieMewX 9h ago

A miracle did happen that is both unprofitable and while not technically original, I'd count it as clever. Ai can decompile any game and jam things together. Look up Skyrim in Minecraft

This is the most excited I've been about gaming in ages. Everything is getting broken open so we can do what we want with it

1

u/graypasser 1h ago

It didn't, in slightest.

2

u/BigGayGinger4 9h ago

you're getting downvoted, but, people forget that there are entirely new humans who haven't experienced the world who are reaching different degrees of consciousness, autonomy, and eventually financial independence -- every 5-10 years

Kids are gonna fuckin love video games in 10 years, and in 20 years, and in 50 years, because kids fuckin love video games, and kids are people who have only existed for 5-10 years or so, lol.

As for the industry, who knows, but there will always be a target market that hasn't experienced last decade's tropes yet

1

u/tacticalcraptical 9h ago

Unoriginal, absolutely.

Unprofitable, I'm not so sure. A lot of the most profitable games this century have been unoriginal and incremental type releases and AI is likely to accelerate those types of releases.

1

u/VaporousMote 9h ago

He is right and he should say it.

1

u/thisistherevolt 8h ago

Sakurai being extremely based as usual.

0

u/Meleagant1 9h ago

We’ve been getting hammered with unoriginal games nonstop for decades now. So many just trash “retro”, shooters, 8bit, etc garbage just flooding the market. This is no different and honestly at least the AI style looks refreshing with some of the projects I’ve been seeing.

The yearly sports releases are also just unoriginal trash.

3

u/nobbytho 8h ago

that's because it's coming from the same place the AI comes from: corporate greed.

we've been blessed with extremely creative and honestly wonderful games from indie Devs.

the same indie Devs now can't reveal their games too early fearing ai might copy and turn out a sloppier version of their game that AI bros will happily play instead.

-1

u/jonnyg1097 9h ago

I am probably gonna get downvoted for this take, but I think it will help a handful of people who want to make a game (and have an original idea) but don't know how to make games properly, get through the process of making it to tell the story that they want to.

Hopefully they will learn something through the process so if they decide to make another one after they won't be so reliant on AI to make it.

3

u/lethalized 8h ago

Have you done this yourself? The whole going from being the idea guy to the person doing everything on your own.

Not advocating for or against AI here it's just A LOT to learn with or without AI

1

u/jonnyg1097 7h ago

I do have a thought of a game that I've always wanted to make and I have actually started the process of doing it. I do though, have the added benefit of getting some proper training from school on the process of how a game can go from modelling software to game engine, but doing it on my own is a lot of work as you said. AI will certainly help me in some steps. It's not something that I will rely on 100%.

0

u/LocoMod 8h ago

The great majority of video games were unoriginal and unprofitable before AI. But since it's cool to hate on AI for everything, let's.

0

u/g_bleezy 8h ago

Or, or, or…. The barrier for getting great ideas to interactable content that can be distributed worldwide just got flattened by A LOT and we’re about to hit a golden era of gaming. Black pills are so lame. Onward!

3

u/StillbornPartyHat 7h ago

For every one good game that comes out of this, there's gonna be a couple thousand more examples of absolute crap. The effort barrier is your friend as a consumer.

1

u/g_bleezy 7h ago

I agree the market is going to be flooded with content that doesn't appeal to you, since more people will be making more of it. Where I disagree is whether that's a bad thing.

Knowing C++ and having a buddy who can pitch the suits doesn't automatically make someone's game better. Those are barriers to entry, not measures of quality. Look at what happened when social media overtook traditional media: there's vastly more content now, most of it extremely niche, and people are better off because they can find exactly what they're into.

I'd rather curation happen after games are made, by players deciding what's good, than before, by gatekeepers deciding who gets to make them.

0

u/OkRiver4450 8h ago

i hate AI and people are saying that there is already slop games but i also want to acknowledge that this is coming from the guy and company that has also been relying on the same characters for their entire existence. Nintendo lives off of its original IP and rarely have had anything fresh break into the mainstream. just keep releasing the games that were good at its most fundamental

2

u/HotwheelsSisyphus 7h ago

I feel like the characters are the same but the games do try to do something different. The Zelda series is constantly adding new mechanics.

-3

u/FarWaltz73 8h ago

Nintendo isn't really creative as you said. Plus they're deeply anti-consumer with both a very anti-ownership stance on modding the hardware and software you allegedly "own" after paying for alongside an outdated exclusivity model.

Probably one of the gaming companies that needs to be shaken up by the new landscape the most.

0

u/chocolateboomslang 9h ago

Those already exist. They're everywhere already.

0

u/93458758943579485768 8h ago

really funny he had to say how not profitable it is, because that's really all that matters to japanese devs. as soon as that corner is turned it's absolutely over.

but sure let's pretend sakurai has done ANYthing interesting over the last 20 years.

0

u/No0delZ 8h ago

"Unprofitable" = Unexploitable.

"Flood of games that players simply don't want."
The Macho Man said it best. "The cream always rises... to the top. Ohh yeahh."

0

u/headphonesXX 7h ago

meanwhile tim sweeney pushing AI slop everywhere bc their unreal engine is full of AI slop tools

-1

u/Major_Stranger 8h ago

Once again mistaking the trees for the Forest. Why is that when people talk of AI they assume every single task would be handled by AI? AI is very good at known pattern and itteration. It is not replacing the original idea, it is incapable of giving you an original idea. You, the human, the operator, are expected to bring the idea, the concept art, something for AI to iterate on based on your prompt.