Overview

• Masahiro Sakurai warned that creating modern large-scale titles has become too time-consuming and risks industry sustainability.
• He suggested generative AI as a tool to streamline workflows and help studios adapt to escalating development demands.
• A surge of criticism followed flawed machine translations that portrayed his cautious hypotheticals as an unequivocal endorsement of AI.
• A shrinking pool of Japanese developers intensifies the unsustainability challenge and spurs talk of alternative staffing or automation solutions.
• Nintendo’s leadership remains wary of mainstream AI use even as competitors like EA and Microsoft ramp up investments in generative technologies.