Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto pushes back on gaming's AI craze

While the rest of the video game industry is tripping over itself to shove generative AI into every corner of game development, Nintendo is quietly heading for the exit.

Speaking to The New York Times around the opening of the new Nintendo Museum, legendary designer and company representative director Shigeru Miyamoto made it clear that Nintendo has zero interest in following the crowd.

"There is a lot of talk about AI, for example," Miyamoto explained. "When that happens, everyone starts to go in the same direction, but that is where Nintendo would rather go in a different direction."

He added that while it might look like Nintendo is going backward just for the sake of being contrarian, the goal is actually figuring out what makes Nintendo truly special.

Chasing margins vs. protecting the craft

Miyamoto's take stands in stark contrast to the rest of the gaming world.

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson recently boasted that generative AI would boost EA's efficiency by 30% and monetization by 20% over the next five years, arguing it will push players to spend 10 to 20% more on games. Embracer Group, which laid off 1,500 people over the past year, unveiled its own ambitious AI development pipeline back in June.

Tech giants like Nvidia are also going full throttle. Nvidia's Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE)—which promises unscripted natural language chats with NPCs—is set to debut next year in the mech fighter Mecha BREAK. Jensen Huang even claimed that modern computer graphics are now impossible without artificial intelligence.

Nintendo, however, has maintained a disciplined skepticism. Back in July, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa acknowledged that generative tech could be creative, but quickly warned about IP liabilities. He emphasized that Nintendo’s decades of game design know-how deliver value that raw technology simply cannot replicate.

Ironically, the main place Nintendo appears to be deploying AI right now is in protecting its copyright. A firm named Tracer has been using AI detection tools to issue DMCA strikes on X against users posting illicit Mario images, many generated by xAI’s relatively unfiltered Grok chatbot.

Why it matters

Nintendo’s refusal to jump on the generative bandwagon is a rare breath of sanity in an industry obsessed with buzzwords.

For players, this is great news. It means your next Zelda or Mario adventure won’t be diluted with hallucinating chatbot NPCs or synthetic slop generated just to cut production budgets. Nintendo understands that great games come from deliberate, human-crafted design, not statistical guesswork.

We think this contrarian stance highlights a fundamental split in the industry. Western publishers are using generative AI primarily as a cost-cutting and monetization lever to please shareholders, while Nintendo relies on signature, handcrafted IP that technology alone cannot manufacture.

That said, taking the road less traveled carries real trade-offs. As competitors learn to use machine learning to build massive open-world assets in half the time, Nintendo’s refusal to lean on generative shortcuts could widen the production-cycle gap between its marquee releases.