For the past nearly 35 years, Masahiro Sakurai has been one of the most successful video game developers in the business, and for the past year and a half or so, he’s been doing well for himself in the YouTube space too.
Sakurai may be going to put his focus back on his main career, however, with his newly announced plans to step away from video making.
The Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creator just posted this message today on his YouTube community page.
“It’s a bit late to be saying this, but…Happy New Year!,” he wrote. “I’m planning to wrap up Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games sometime this year.
Until then, I hope you’ll stay tuned!”
While Sakurai didn’t say exactly why or when he’ll be ending content on his channel, the most likely reason as to why it’s happening is to shift back to actual game development — or maybe he’s just truly planned out all of his video ideas.
Just a few weeks ago, Sakurai revealed that he’s still “creating games for the time being” after stating the year before that he was “semi-retired.”
The 53-year-old gaming icon hasn’t publicly worked on a new project since Super Smash Bros. Ultimate released in 2018, which wrapped up content with Kingdom Hearts’ Sora back in 2021.
That’s quite a bit of time to take a step back, re-evaluate everything and head into a new venture though what it is of course not known yet.
With Smash Ultimate coming back with some new updates in 2024, he could be overseeing that production again though there’s probably not much to do there unless there happens to be balance changes in the works.
With how much energy Sakurai is known to devote to his game making, it’d make the most sense if he was getting enraptured in something new and will no longer be able to make the time for his YouTube channel that started in August 2022.
If this presumed new project is Smash-related, it’ll be supremely interesting to see if it’ll be a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Deluxe with more content and features on the long-rumored Nintendo Switch successor or a brand new entry in the beloved platform fighter.
Or maybe it’s time he wants to work on something else before he potentially retires for real considering he’s only seriously been developing Smash games for almost 12 years now since Kid Icarus: Uprising.
No matter what Sakurai’s next project is, though, it’s still probably going to be at least a year or more until we all get to see it for ourselves.