🏆 "Personally, I don't like awards given to games." Masahiro Sakurai, the director behind Kirby and Super Smash Bros., said that in an interview published on October 16, 2026. He had just spent 16 years running one.

The prize was the Game Designers Award, which he founded inside the Japan Game Awards in 2010 and led as chief judge. Its 17th and last winner was announced on September 15, 2026, and then the award itself ended, with nobody taking it over.

A ranking he never believed in

The remark came in a long interview with the Japanese games site Denfaminicogamer, conducted in late September 2026 by deputy editor Keigo Toyoda, roughly two weeks after the final ceremony. He said it while explaining how he picked the judges.

Tastes differ, he says, games are made for those tastes, and what makes games fun spreads out in many directions. Forcing all of that onto one scale and naming a number one is, in his view, wrong. Part of him, he said, is against game awards altogether, and he laughed as he turned the question on himself: who does a judge think they are?

He has said this before. After Super Smash Bros. Ultimate won the Grand Award at the 2019 Japan Game Awards, Sakurai made the same point in his Famitsu magazine column in October 2019. According to an English translation published by DualShockers, he wrote that lining games up for prizes is presumptuous, because every game has its own value. The column was about his own game taking the top prize.

So why run one?

The Japan Game Awards are organized by CESA, the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association, a Japanese game industry body. Sakurai's problem was with how the top prize gets decided. In the interview, he says the Grand Award rests mainly on popular votes from players, and on how many votes a game gets more than on what those votes say. Widely played games have the edge, and so do games whose publishers campaign hard.

The Game Designers Award was his answer: a second top prize, for originality. Jiro Ishii, director of the adventure game 428: Shibuya Scramble and one of three judges who sat on every panel, recalled the pitch in a comment published alongside the interview. In 2009, his 428 and FromSoftware's Demon's Souls had both won Awards for Excellence. Sakurai later told him that if games like Demon's Souls never received recognition on par with the top prize, the industry would shrink.

He kept it going, he says, because the people who made the winning games were happy. A prize leaves something visible behind every year, which a sales run does not. He accepts that anyone handing out prizes can be called arrogant, but still thinks the award had value for players and creators.

Every year, he felt it was rude to ask working directors, whose job is to make games, to act as critics of other people's work, and he says he might have turned the request down himself. But he did not believe the popular vote alone was enough either. That dilemma never went away.

How a winner was chosen

Judges had to be directors, not producers, who had made original games, and Sakurai invited almost all of them personally. Over the years the panel included Hideki Kamiya (Bayonetta), Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus), Hidetaka Miyazaki (Dark Souls), Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), Yoko Taro (Nier) and Toby Fox (Undertale). Judges were forbidden to discuss their picks with one another, so that a friendly dinner could not tilt the result.

In the first round, each judge split 10 points however they liked: all on one game, or a point or two across several. Games that went over 10 points with backing from more than one judge, usually three to six of them, moved to a second round. In recent years, every judge had to choose exactly one there. Anything released as a product was eligible, including Steam games and early-access titles.

At the ceremony, Sakurai presented the winner by playing it live on stage, in about five or six minutes. Games that did not fit got a video he shot and edited himself.

Seventeen winners, fifteen made outside Japan

Year Winner Developed in
2010 Heavy Rain France
2011 Scribblenauts United States
2012 Journey United States
2013 The Unfinished Swan United States
2014 Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Sweden
2015 Ingress United States
2016 Life Is Strange France
2017 Inside Denmark
2018 Gorogoa United States
2019 Astro Bot Rescue Mission Japan
2020 Baba Is You Finland
2021 Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit United States
2022 Inscryption Canada
2023 RPG Time: The Legend of Wright Japan
2024 Viewfinder United Kingdom
2025 Indika Russia / Kazakhstan
2026 Word Game (Moji Yugi) Taiwan

By our count, 15 of the 17 winners were developed outside Japan, six of them in the United States. The two Japanese winners are Astro Bot Rescue Mission, from Sony's Japan Studio, and RPG Time, from DeskWorks. Mario Kart Live carries Nintendo's name, but it was developed by Velan Studios in the United States. Indika's developer, Odd Meter, moved from Russia to Kazakhstan during development.

The last winner, Word Game by the Taiwanese team Team9, builds everything out of text, characters and scenery included, and the hero moves forward by changing what the words mean. In its citation, CESA said the game won the second round by a wide margin, and noted that the Japanese version had been localized from Traditional Chinese.

"There was no one to replace me"

At the September 15 ceremony at Hulic Hall Tokyo, Sakurai explained the ending in one line: "There was no one to replace me." He then described the job. Whoever ran the award had to recruit and coordinate directors of original games, then stand on stage and present someone else's game, every year, even in the busiest stretch of their own production. He had looked for a successor for several years.

The line split opinion. On Hatena Bookmark, a Japanese social bookmarking site, some read it as arrogance, while others said it was about workload. The interview and the judges' comments support the second reading. Sakurai says that three years earlier he had told the organizers the award would end unless an alternative turned up within three years. He asked the judges directly whether anyone would take over. Nobody could, and Kamiya told him it was impossible. Kazutoshi Iida, another judge who never missed a year, wrote that his old emails show a successor was already a problem in 2020, and that the phrase had taken on a life of its own.

Sakurai also thinks he could coordinate the award largely because he belongs to no company. If he worked at Nintendo, people would suspect a Nintendo bias. If a media outlet ran the prize, he said, people would suspect it of doing favors.

The award was unpaid work. So was his YouTube channel, Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, which released 260 episodes in Japanese and English until October 2024 and was never monetized despite costing about 90 million yen (about $570,000) to make.

Originality and a slow death

The closing speech drew wide attention in Japan. Originality, he told the audience, does little for sales. Few people try every new drink at the convenience store; most want the taste they already expect. Yet an industry that loses originality, he said, can only die slowly, because the games of today exist thanks to people who once invented something new.

In the interview he ties that to AI. He expects AI to push the number of games on Steam even higher, and he thinks most of them will never earn a living. AI can draw on what has already been made, he says, but not on what has never existed.

His own work runs into the same problem. His newest game, Kirby Air Riders, won an Award for Excellence at the same 2026 ceremony, yet he says in the interview that some players still dismiss it as a fake Mario Kart.

Sakurai did not talk about foreign prizes such as The Game Awards in the United States, or the Game of the Year sweep we covered for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. His question still applies to every one of them: should games be ranked at all, and if they are, who should do the ranking? Is there a game award in your country that you actually trust?

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