“Tired and miserable people aren’t going to create good work.” Why FuturLab embraced a no-crunch policy

Brighton-based FuturLab has been making games for more than 20 years, but the studio is mostly known for PowerWash Simulator, which remains its biggest hit by a considerable margin. Following its Early Access release in 2021, PowerWash Simulator has gone on to reach more than 17 million players, and the game spawned a well-received sequel in 2025.

But one thing that not everyone might know about FuturLab is that it operates a strict ‘no crunch’ policy. Kirsty Rigden – who was previously co-CEO of FuturLab alongside founder James Marsden, but took over as sole CEO in 2023 after Marsden retired – says that the studio has always embraced a zero-crunch approach. Rigden previously worked at Brighton’s Relentless Software, maker of the Buzz! quiz games, and she says it was a similar state of affairs over there, with nine-to-five working rigidly enforced.

“Everyone in the office leaves at five o’clock,” emphasises Rigden. “I cannot stress enough how I think that it’s really important for people, but also games, to have a life outside of it.”

Yet that no-crunch policy is harder to follow when you’re the CEO, with the fate of the company and its employees in your hands. She admits to working late in the past, although less so now that she has two small children. “I think you’d find it hard to find any owner who didn’t have to work outside office hours. You have a real responsibility to your staff, and if an opportunity comes about, and things are looking a bit shaky, am I going to go, ‘Well, no, I’m not going to stay a couple of hours later and put in a pitch to get that bit of work?'”

The difference is that she would never ask her staff to do the same, she says – but when you’re the boss, there’s little room for respite.

“If you want a hilarious story, with PowerWash 1 the publisher was Square Enix, and I actually read the publishing contract that they sent us while I was waiting to be wheeled in for a C-section,” recalls Rigden. “Wouldn’t recommend. I mean, it sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it’s quite boring sitting in hospitals.”

Back when everyone worked in the office, it was easy enough to turn off the lights and shuffle everyone out of the door at five o’clock. But nowadays FuturLab encourages remote-working, and Rigden says this makes it harder to implement their no-crunch policy.

“I can’t physically make people stop,” she says. “All I can say is: I absolutely do not want you to crunch. If you feel you need to crunch, come and talk to us. We’ll cut scope, we’ll get some outsourcing or something – there are other ways of doing it, you don’t need to crunch. Because tired and miserable people aren’t going to create good work. So all I can do is say that and help people. And as far as I am aware, there hasn’t been any crunch. And if there has, then that is on the individual, who has not gone through the policies that we have.”

But how can companies avoid crunch from a practical perspective? The nature of game development means that work tends to ramp up towards the game’s release date, as bugs are found and need to be fixed before the title makes its public debut. Rigden has an easy fix for that problem: “Don’t tell anyone when it’s coming out until it’s ready to go.”

That was the approach FuturLab took with PowerWash Simulator 2, only announcing the game’s official release date a couple of weeks before launch, at a point when the game was fully done. Yet that’s a luxury FuturLab can afford, self-publishing a sequel to a hit that’s guaranteed to get attention. Developers who are tied into outside publishing deals – which might involve big marketing pushes at launch that are hard to reschedule – might not be so lucky.

Rigden says this is something FuturLab faced in the past, but it still stuck to its no-crunch policy regardless. “We’d worked on previous games with a publisher where there were tight deadlines and things, and honestly, we just cut scope,” she says. “That’s the way we dealt with it. We just [said], ‘Let’s look at what we’ve got left to do, what’s important, what is perhaps not so important, and cut it. But also, thank God we don’t live in a world where we have to stamp discs and get them out the door. You can put out updates and continue to support the game.”

Remote-first FTW

FuturLab’s remote-first policy may make it harder to keep tabs on employees and ensure they’re not working unsanctioned overtime, but Rigden says it’s been essential for attracting talent to the firm.

The policy originated during the COVID pandemic, when FuturLab found it had to staff up rapidly after the success of PowerWash Simulator. “It’s hard to get talent and be like, ‘Can you please uproot you and your entire family to move down here to Brighton?’ Which, by the way, is a lovely place if you’re going to move. But it’s a big ask. So it made sense for us. We were able to scale quite quickly. We were able to get really good people.”

Now, there’s no question of going back – or insisting, like some companies have done, that employees come into the office at least part of the time. “No, I would never do that,” says Rigden, emphasising how ridiculous it would be to ask employees to travel potentially hundreds of miles to come in. “I mean, how’s that going to work?”

Rigden emphasises the benefits of remote working – “People don’t have to commute, they can stick the laundry on” – and adds that it benefits the company, too. “Obviously we have an office, which is lovely, but it doesn’t have to accommodate the 115 people or whatever we are, so that keeps costs down.”

But she admits there are complications with remote working, too. “It’s harder in some respects,” she says. “It’s really hard to make people feel constantly connected. There’s more meetings than there would be otherwise, because you’ve got to really make sure that lines of communication are open and everyone’s in alignment. So you have to force people to talk a lot rather than the natural walking around the office.”

It’s perhaps more difficult to forge a sense of social cohesion, too. But FuturLab does try to enable social bonding between team members: in addition to two whole-company gatherings each year, the studio encourages social meet-ups of employee groups located in different parts of the UK.

Not just the PowerWash people

The PowerWash Simulator franchise has been nothing short of a phenomenon for FuturLab, and Rigden gives credit to the publisher of the first game, Square Enix, for their help in getting it off the ground.

“We had a really good relationship with them, it was very collaborative,” she says. “They let us lead a lot on marketing. We did a lot of the work ourselves, because we knew the game better, and they amplified it and helped where necessary… They were great, but ultimately we wanted to move into self-publishing as our long-term strategy.”

Self-publishing is something FuturLab is familiar with – Rigden notes that many of their previous games before PowerWash Simulator were self-published. “So it’s sort of our normal mode anyway, but it’s nice that we’re a bit freer in terms of content drops and things like that, because we don’t have to go through a big machine. We can just do it ourselves.”

That process of adding content wasn’t so quick previously. “We’d send them a build, and then they’d have to test it all, but it would be under their schedules, and they would have slots [for testing] because they were trying to manage lots of things at once. Whereas we don’t have any of that.”

“Basically, there’s infinite amounts of stuff to wash out there”

In contrast to the first PowerWash Simulator, which had a “very slow, steady rise” in interest, says Rigden, the second game saw a huge initial spike in players thanks to the franchise’s growing fame. And just as the first title featured collaborations with franchises like Wallace & Gromit and Tomb Raider, more team-ups are planned for the second game – and companies are queuing up to be involved. “We get a lot of people wanting to work with us,” says Rigden, although she notes that character-heavy collabs don’t tend to work. “We’re not washing the people.” Still, they won’t be running out of things to put in the game any time soon. “Basically, there’s infinite amounts of stuff to wash out there.”

Not that it’s all about washing. There’s an ongoing, often very silly narrative between the two PowerWash titles that connects everything together and helps to involve players. Although Rigden says the story wasn’t in there at the very beginning – and in fact narrative has never been a big emphasis for her. “It’s not a thing that draws me in. So if I had been solely in charge, I just probably wouldn’t have thought to put it in, to be honest. But our design director and our brilliant game writer just managed to weave this incredible story.”

Despite the huge, ongoing success of the PowerWash Simulator series, it’s not the only thing FuturLab wants to focus on. “We’ve always tried to do two projects at once… so we’ve got another game which I’m really excited about,” says Rigden. “I actually really love PowerWash, I play every night. I mean, you’d think I’d be sick of it, but I’m not. PowerWash can go on forever, and there’s so many things we can do with it – but we don’t want to just be a PowerWash studio… We’re always thinking about, ‘What else could we do?'”

Rigden may well still enjoy playing PowerWash every night, but we imagine many others at the company might be ready to move on to something else after five years or more working on the same thing. We wonder whether that broader focus is partly about keeping FuturLab’s staff happy.

“Yeah, it is,” says Rigden. “I think you probably lose a sense of enjoying creativity if you’re doing the same thing all the time. And also, from a boring logistics point of view, it’s much easier to have two projects and be able to move people around rather than go, ‘Oh, this project doesn’t need as many people for a bit. What am I going to do with them?’ It means you’re much more flexible as a studio in terms of resources.”

“People want games. I think it’s just about getting money back into the industry”

It’s heartening to see a UK studio thriving at a time when the overall narrative in the country’s games industry is far more gloomy, with companies like Splash Damage and Three Fields Entertainment issuing studio-wide redundancy notices. Rigden thinks the layoffs we’ve seen over the past few years are a continuing correction from overinvestment during the COVID era, but she reckons the UK industry will recover.

“Of course it will,” she says. “If I were an investor, I’d be like: ‘Now’s the time’. No one’s making games. There’s going to be no games coming out in a couple of years. Make some games. Discoverability is going to be easier. It will pick up again.”

“I doubt it will go back to the COVID boom, but it’ll recover from where it is now, for sure. I mean, there’s a demand for games. People want games. I think it’s just about getting money back into the industry from working with the government, and investors calming down and looking for opportunities again.”