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.”
