Masahiro Sakurai has spent 16 years presenting a Tokyo Game Show award for inventive game design. The 2026 event marked the final year of the Game Designers Award, prompting a serious reflection on why originality still matters.
The award recognised fresh design ideas without judging a game by its commercial performance. Previous recipients included Life Is Strange, Mario Kart: Home Circuit, Viewfinder and Scribblenauts, with more than one game sometimes honoured in a single year.
Speaking at the final presentation, Sakurai argued that originality is often undervalued by the market because it does not reliably translate into sales. He compared familiar game design to a limited-time drink flavour: novelty can attract attention, but many people eventually return to tastes they already know.
“An industry that loses that sort of originality will only die slowly,” Sakurai said, while stressing that games exist today because creators continue to introduce new ideas and experiences.
Why new ideas are difficult to sell
In an interview with Denfaminico Gamer, Sakurai returned to the design thinking behind Kirby and Super Smash Bros. Both series entered established genres—2D platformers and fighting games—but created distinct identities by giving players new ways to act and interact.
That process is more demanding than simply improving a recognised formula. A genuinely new system has no obvious comparison point, making it harder to explain to a development team and even harder for a publisher to communicate to potential customers.
Publishers need clear selling points, yet originality often asks audiences to want something they have not encountered before. Sakurai noted that modern games are frequently described as “something-like” another title, reflecting a preference for familiar concepts rather than untested ideas.
For players interested in how design choices translate into physical play, our Arcade Blog explores developments across the arcade world. Original control methods and carefully designed interactions remain central to the appeal of a dedicated arcade machine.
AI increases the volume of familiar games
Sakurai believes generative AI could make the originality problem more severe. When the award began in 2010, approximately 275 games were sold on Steam during a typical year. That figure has since grown beyond 19,000, while over 8000 titles in this month’s Steam Next Fest alone demonstrate the scale of today’s discovery challenge.
His concern is not simply that AI will produce more games. He expects many of those releases to be unplayable, difficult to track and built from ideas that already exist. As production becomes easier, the number of near-identical games could grow faster than players can meaningfully assess them.
He pointed to Librarian, a puzzle game about restoring order to mixed-up books in a magical world, as an example of a simple premise that attracted imitators. Titles such as Supermarket Chaos and Needle in a Haystack Simulator followed similar puzzle structures, a pattern he believes automated tools could reproduce easily.
Sakurai also suggested that AI might analyse the mood and presentation of Fumito Ueda’s ICO and Shadow of the Colossus to create something that resembles them. However, imitation would not reveal what Ueda himself will imagine next. For Sakurai, that unpredictable human leap is the essential value of originality.
Why originality still has a place
The end of the Game Designers Award does not mean Sakurai has abandoned the principle it represented. His argument is that distinctive ideas become more important as the market fills with familiar designs and AI-assisted copies.
Arcade creators face a similar design challenge: a cabinet needs more than a recognisable format to earn attention. Whether you are comparing machines with our Arcade Machine Buying Guide, planning a custom build with DIY arcade kits or choosing a compact bartop arcade, the strongest experiences usually give players a reason to interact rather than merely reproduce a template.
Sakurai’s warning is ultimately a call to protect room for experimentation. If new designers can continue creating ideas that players could not have requested in advance, the games industry can keep evolving. Without that creative renewal, he fears it may slowly lose the quality that makes it worth sustaining.
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