When it comes to making games, Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai believes that working out the amount of content included in them early on is important, which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider just how much was packed into his latest fighting game installment.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate will be seven years old this December, if you can believe it, but I'm still in awe at the sheer amount of stuff that the devs included. Alongside the endlessly replayable main fighting mode, we got a full-fledged campaign, the return of every fighter who'd ever featured in the series, a further 12 DLC characters to pack out an enormous 82-character roster, and much, much more. It's the sort of game that could keep you busy forever if you wanted it to, which makes sense considering Sakurai's latest comments in an interview with Japanese site Nikkei Cross Trend.
In the interview (translated by Google and verified using DeepL), Sakurai talks about the importance of considering a game's "volume," noting that he plays other developers' games to the end as often as he can. This helps give an idea of "the volume of modern games," as well as how satisfying they are to complete, he says.
Although you can certainly get an understanding of how a game works just from playing a bit of it, Sakurai argues that approach would mean you don't really know "how many hours it can be played, how much fun it offers," and how it evolves unless you complete it.
He reiterates that a game's volume is "something that should not be underestimated," although that's clearly not just to ensure players are kept busy, as he notes that it influences manpower and the costs behind it. It's for this reason that he thinks it's "important to be able to show the approximate volume estimate" from a game's proposal stage.
We already know that Sakurai is working on his next game, although we don't know what it's going to be, or how big it is. Based on these latest comments, though, it sounds like the developer himself must have a good idea of that by now – after all, it's apparently been in development since August 2022.
