- Published on
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director 'can't hope to compete with what doctors do,' but he's content to 'buff peoples' lives' with games
Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai reflects on his career, spending $600k on his YouTube channel to share game dev knowledge, believing games can positively impact lives despite not rivaling professions like medicine. He teases a new game, possibly shown in upcoming Nintendo Directs.
Super Smash Bros. series director and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai is "conscious" that game developers can't "compete" with the work of some professions, like doctors, but he still believes games can "buff" peoples' everyday lives regardless.
While accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 30th AMD Ceremony earlier this week, Sakurai broke down why he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a YouTube channel where he gave the public three decades of pent up game dev advice at no cost.
"I did something extremely irrational on my channel," Sakurai said, as reported on by Oricon and translated by Automaton, "I disseminated all of my knowledge as a game director to the whole world for free. Why did I do that? I feel like I'm losing to a lot of professions out there. While I am making my own contributions, I can't even hope to compete with what doctors do, for instance."
Sakurai explained the insecurity stems from the fact that "without peace and health, people cannot enjoy digital entertainment" like the mega-popular games he makes. "This is something I'm conscious of."
Still, he's not entirely hopeless about the career path he's gone down since the '90s and thinks games can "'buff' peoples' lives, making it an extremely rewarding profession." That's an incredibly fighting game-coded way of phrasing things, but if anyone can get away with it, it's the man who successfully buffed and nerfed and balanced 86 characters to perfection.
Sakurai hasn't publicly announced the next game he's working on after his magnum opus Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the brawler that swept every fighter and almost every stage from the series' entire history under one roof. Though Nintendo is holding an OG Switch-focused Direct later today and a special Nintendo Switch 2 Direct next week, so we might just hear about his next game soon. (Cross your fingers for another Kid Icarus, please, people.)