Kirsty Rigden will be taking over as the sole CEO of FuturLab following the retirement of founder James Marsden.
Rigden started her role as FuturLab’s CEO in September, having been a co-CEO since August 2022 and development director at the studio since 2010.
Marsden founded FuturLab in 2003, and has overseen the development of games such as PowerWash Simulator, Peaky Blinders: Mastermind, and Velocity over the course of two decades.
He will now focus his attention on music, but will remain on FuturLab’s board as a founding member.
“Over the last 20 years I’ve lived a bonafide indie game experience,” said Marsden in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz. “From humble beginnings with its first employee working from my graduate flat-share bedroom, through countless near breaking point moments along the way, FuturLab managed to stay in business long enough to get lucky.”
He continued: “The studio has now grown to over 100 professional game developers with multiple projects underway and a commercial hit that reaches many new players every day. I’m privileged and grateful to have taken this journey, but the time has come for me to attend to a passion that I’ve necessarily had to sacrifice during this time.
“The truth is that I founded FuturLab with the specific goal of making music for games, and whilst FuturLab could now be fairly described as a leading UK independent game studio – an accomplishment I’m incredibly proud of sharing with Kirsty and the team – it’s not my true passion.”
He added that, following the studio’s growth, FuturLab is now “serious business” and as such “needs an authentic leader whose true passion is unquestionably games.”
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox
