Sony has announced that co-founder of Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yōtei developer Sucker Punch Productions, Brian Fleming, is stepping down from his leadership position. With Fleming having been noted as working on passing the torch to his successors over the last year, he will be stepping down at the end of 2025. The leadership of the studio will be taken up by long time creative and technical leads Jason Connell and Adrian Bentley.
Since the studio was founded all the way back in 1997, Fleming has been in charge. The company would become an official part of the PlayStation banner in 2000, and Fleming has steered it throughout the development of a host of games, from the Sly Cooper trilogy on the PS2, to the inFamous series on PS3. After the release of inFamous First Light on the PS4 back in 2014, the studio would then begin work on its most successful release—Ghost of Tsushima.
As for Fleming’s successors, both Connell and Bentley have been with Sucker Punch Productions for quite some time. Connell worked as co-director on both Ghost of Tsushima and its sequel, Ghost of Yōtei, while Bentley served as the technical director at the studio, steering its engineering and production efforts. The two will also serve as creative leads for Sucker Punch Productions alongside Nate Fox.
“Brian’s vision and leadership have shaped the studio’s culture of creativity and collaboration and established a foundation that Jason, Adrian, and the entire team will build on as they look to the future,” wrote Sony in its announcement.
Fleming had previously spoken quite a bit about the studio’s general direction in light of the successful release of Ghost of Yōtei earlier this year. Back in October, he had noted that Sucker Punch Productions will continue to remain single-project studio, rather than splitting its teams up to work on multiple games at the same time.
He revealed this as part of an interview where he noted that, while he may not be sure about the studio’s next major project, he doesn’t want to overextend his teams by juggling multiple projects. He also noted that, while there is no shortage of good ideas to work on, the studio only really gets to pick one thing to work on.
“The truth is that whatever we do next, whether it’s continuing Ghost or going back to Sly, the decision is really more limited by, again, our cherishing of focus and time to iterate, which means that we really can only do one thing at a time,” he said. “If we were good at juggling four projects, yeah, we’d have a remaster, and let’s go do one of those, and one of those, and do some fan request, that would be really popular… But we only get to do one thing.”
“So it kind of has to be your best idea, right?” he continued. “And that’s really clarifying. It’s not like there aren’t 15 good ideas. But you only get to do one. And by the way, you only get to do one about every five years. So that choice is really important. I mean, that is choosing your college and your major every five years.”
For more details on the studio’s most recent release, Ghost of Yōtei, check out our review. The game is available on PS5, and just last month got an update that brought with it support for variable refresh rate displays.