Game studios everywhere are grappling with the impact of expensive years-long development cycles that can turn big budget games into huge financial boondoggles. And while that conversation has taken place over the specter of big-budget financial misfires like Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, it turns out even studios turning out hit games like PlayStation-owned Sucker Punch Productions are worried about those expansive timelines as well.
That’s according to outgoing studio head and company co-founder Brian Fleming, who discussed the topic with Game Developer after Ghost of Yotei won the award for “Best Adventure Game” at the 2026 DICE Awards. “These games are taking us on-or-off about five years right now,” he said. “Candidly, we really wish that number was four.”
“If we could get it down to four, that would be amazing.”
Sucker Punch’s process has certainly paid off, not just with awards but also in terms of sales numbers. Sony reported that the game “outperformed” its predecessor Ghost of Tsushima in a recent financial report. Fleming said the desire to reclaim those years is about the “opportunity cost” of its developers’ careers.
He said is that the studio has spent an “inordinate amount” of time thinking about optimizing tools and production processes, but those conversations have been “insufficient.” “That is like treading water or maybe even losing a little bit of ground,” he remarked. “The real secret we think going forward is going to be designing games that can be built in shorter periods of time.”
Fleming clarified that developers shouldn’t expect “episodic” games or anything of that nature from Sucker Punch, but that the studio is “thinking hard” about how its design choices influence the scope of games it produces—all with the goal of reducing its production timelines to four years (which may still feel like eons to other studios).
Sucker Punch’s next game will hopefully be made in four years
Don’t expect Sucker Punch to double its team size in hopes of producing games at a faster pace any time soon. Fleming downplayed the idea that increasing the number of people working on its games—or using generative AI tools—will solve this particular problem.
“We don’t entertain the idea that growing the team is the right strategy,” he said. “We feel like the number of man-years that went into [Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei] is what we think is the max.”
“This isn’t about offshoring. This isn’t about AI. This is about how you think about the delivered product…what it is, and what you’re trying to do, and how you can do that by continuing to be a sculptor of that project and subtract away all the things that are not essential.”
Fleming’s comments align with what we heard from rank-and-file developers last year when pressing the topic of long development cycles. Though we framed the topic as being about “poor leadership,” several developers we spoke with said it was leadership’s inability to firmly define the project that sometimes lengthened development times. Fleming’s comments echo that sentiment, and it will be worth watching to see if his successors Jason Connell and Adrian Bentley can shape that vision.
Of course, Sucker Punch leadership faced a challenge of a different kind last year when the studio fired a texture artist for mocking the killing of Charlie Kirk. Fleming defended the firing in an interview with Game File, saying that “making light of someone’s murder is a deal-breaker for us, and we condemn that, kind of in no uncertain terms.”