Masahiro Sakurai, the celebrated creator behind Super Smash Bros. and Kirby, has opened up about a side of modern game development that many players rarely consider: how frustrating it can feel to work on massive AAA games with huge teams.
In a recent interview with Japanese outlet 47NEWS, Sakurai reflected on his long career in game development, which began in the early 1990s—an era when games were often built by relatively small groups. Comparing that period with today’s blockbuster development pipelines, he explained that the bigger the team becomes, the harder it is for an individual developer to feel clear, personal satisfaction from their work.
Sakurai’s main point is simple, but powerful: when hundreds of people are involved, it becomes difficult to see your own contribution in the final product. He described how fulfilling it is to put in effort and then directly see the results—something that’s much more common when working solo or in a small team. In contrast, large-team development can blur ownership, because not every task produces a visible outcome that feels directly “yours.”
To illustrate, Sakurai pointed to the difference between an artist creating something independently versus managing a larger group. When a pixel artist works alone, the creative process is straightforward: they draw, revise, and finish the piece. But when the job involves coordinating others, progress can be slowed by constant communication and alignment—like repeatedly discussing what kind of pixel art fits the project’s needs. For him, that gap between effort and visible results can be genuinely frustrating.
He also noted that this challenge has intensified as modern AAA development teams have expanded dramatically. Staff counts that once seemed unimaginable are now common, with credits frequently stretching into the hundreds. Sakurai emphasized that the sense of fulfillment from making something by yourself is fundamentally different from the satisfaction of contributing as one part of a much larger machine—and that what developers are expected to do has been shifting along with team size.
Sakurai’s own projects reflect this industry-wide transformation. Kirby’s Dream Land, released in 1992, credited just 14 people. Compare that to later Kirby titles, where the credits can include hundreds of developers, highlighting how game production has scaled up over the decades.
These comments also connect to concerns Sakurai has raised before about ballooning AAA projects. He has pointed out that the time, cost, and resources required for huge modern productions can become unsustainable. In a previous statement from 2025, he suggested the outlook for large-scale game development could be “dark,” while also hinting that generative AI might eventually play a role in keeping projects viable as budgets and development complexity continue to rise.
Sakurai’s remarks tap into a growing conversation across the gaming industry: as AAA games get bigger, longer, and more expensive to build, developers may increasingly struggle to find the same clear creative ownership that once came naturally in smaller teams. For players, it’s a revealing reminder that behind every blockbuster release is not just a massive production effort—but also individual creators trying to feel that their work truly matters.
