Gaming News $550,000 costs and he doesn’t monetize his channel! This legendary Nintendo designer spent a lot of money passing on his knowledge
Masahiro Sakurai is undoubtedly a great man of video games: we owe him the character of Kirby and no less than the Super Smash Bros. saga. It also happens that he’s behind a pretty fabulous YouTube channel that he apparently funded out of his own pocket…
A gigantic career
Masahiro Sakurai is probably one of the most respected developers in this industry. In the late 80s he joined the HAL Laboratory Studio and sees himself behind the creation of the character Kirby, became one of Nintendo’s landmarks and released the first part of the license, Kirby’s Dream Land, in 1992. He then worked on other titles in the saga, But Big N also offers a brand new arena fighting game that will become Super Smash Bros. in 1999. Exactly that.
After releasing Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards in 2000 and Super Smash Bros. After founding Melee in 2001, Sakurai set out to form his own studio Sora in 2003. However, he found it difficult to completely separate himself from his baby and directed Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2012; He was also responsible for the creation of Kid Icarus Uprising (also released in 2012) and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U in 2014. Then a certain Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in 2018 on Switch, holder of all sales records for the franchise.
An iconic YouTube channel… that he self-funded and is coming to an end
Because of his remarkable work over several decades, Sakurai is rightly particularly revered. In 2022 The Japanese opened a YouTube channel called “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games”, the aim of which was to explain the peculiarities of video game design: All aspects of the development are then discussed, popularized and decoded in several dozen videos. All are based on drawings, diagrams, video explanations and also touch on video game marketing, the management aspect and much more. A real goldmine, perfectly illustrated and which had 200,000 subscribers in the first twenty-four hours of its creation.
Two years and 273 videos later, the channel released its very last video this week. In it, Sakurai looks back at the history of these new media and then allows himself to provide some amazing information: If you thought that he went home and prepared all these videos in his free time, that hasn’t been the case sinceHe financed the entire production out of his own pocket. And it cost him… 90 million yen, dollars or 546,480 dollars. And most importantly, the channel was never monetized. “I see this as an investment in a better future for video games”he explains very modestly and succinctly in the middle of a 46-minute video.
The other important information to rememberis that he is officially working on a new video game, scheduled for production in April 2022. It remains to be seen what it is and whether it could be one of the standard bearers for the next Nintendo console…
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