IP games, running Hutch & building a new studio in the AI era
We met with Shaun Rutland, Co-Founder & Ex-CEO of Hutch, to explore how the playbook for building a studio is shifting, and what it takes to do it with clarity and speed.
From delivering mail at Royal Mail to working at PlayStation, to founding and exiting Hutch, Shaun’s journey moves through interesting chapters. Today, he’s building a lean AI-first studio, applying everything he learned about teams, culture, and how games actually get made.
The Unpredictable Path: From Royal Mail to PlayStation to Hutch
Shaun’s journey into gaming didn’t come from a straight line. He left school at 16, started a pirate video game business, and moved from New Zealand to the UK simply because “that’s where the coolest games were being made.” Without industry experience, his first job wasn’t in gaming, it was delivering mail at Royal Mail, navigating London with a printed map and learning the city page by page.
He moved into early e-commerce at Marks & Spencer, converting printed catalogs into one of their first online stores, and that’s where he learned how digital products scale: LTV, cost to acquire a customer, and how digital products scale.
From there, he got his first step into gaming: Lionhead Studios, where he worked long overnight shifts testing Fable back when consoles couldn’t receive updates after launch, so everything had to be perfect on the disc – which meant intense pressure and nonstop work.
Then five years at PlayStation, working on three games, all canceled. Not because they were bad, but because decisions were made in email threads, not in rooms with the teams building them. That led to a belief that shaped his next move:
Make decisions in the room, with the people doing the work. That became Hutch, the studio he co-founded with four others after leaving PlayStation. Their goal was simply to prove they could finish and ship a game.
Their first game made $1M with zero marketing spend, and Shaun convinced the team to reinvest everything back into the company to keep building.
The Strategy Behind Hutch’s Success
At Hutch, Shaun and the team didn’t start by choosing a genre, they started by choosing an audience. Racing games on mobile weren’t performing well at the time, but the culture around cars was huge. People wanted to own a car, compare it, compete, and talk about cars. The insight came from identity and community.
That shift in perspective shaped Hutch’s direction: instead of chasing mechanics, they focused on what car lovers actually care about: brands, social status, emotional connection. That approach led to games like Top Drives and F1 Clash, which went on to define Hutch’s identity and business model.
Shaun’s takeaway was: you build for people who care deeply about a world.
And to do that, someone inside the studio has to genuinely care about the world you’re building for, not just understand it from a slide deck.
What Happens When a Studio Starts Growing
As Hutch grew, Shaun noticed something that most founders only realise when it’s too late: growth brings weight, and if the systems don’t evolve with it, culture starts to drift. Headcount rises faster than purpose. Communication slows. People start asking who owns what.
He explains that the hardest jump isn't from zero to success, but from small to bigger:going from 30 → 50 people, or 50 → 100. That’s when trust, clarity, and speed start to fade. And the danger isn’t obvious, because on paper, growth looks like progress.
He believes that the next wave of studios won’t scale like the old ones. Instead of size, they’ll optimise for clarity, outcome, and speed of decision-making. That thinking now underpins his next chapter: building a lean, AI-first studio with people who stay close to the work. Not because small is cool, but because small teams can change direction faster than big ones.
Why Team Design Matters Now
For Shaun, this moment in time feels similar to the rise of the internet, mobile, and social, a major behavior shift that opens space to rethink how companies are built.
He believes AI is a change in how work gets done, and it gives studios a chance to redesign how teams operate. He points to companies like Anthropic and OpenAI: not for their size, but for the way they run.
In his view, studios that win next will be the ones that stay small enough to move quickly, structured enough to keep decisions close to the work, and flexible enough to let people contribute beyond their titles. The goal isn’t to stay small, it’s to stay capable of changing direction when needed.
The Rise of the Permissionless Culture
Shaun sees AI as a chance to rethink how teams with fewer barriers. He calls it a permissionless culture: where job titles don’t limit contribution.
He’s even building productivity tools himself, despite never having coded before, because he believes everyone should be able to touch the work. And when that happens, people see problems differently. They gain empathy. They understand why certain choices slow things down.
For Shaun, that’s where AI matters most: small teams, fewer boundaries, more ownership, and tools that let anyone contribute when it counts.
What AI Really Changes
When asked which departments AI will impact first, Shaun doesn’t think in departments at all. He thinks in terms of value , where friction slows work down, where time is lost, and where decisions stall. Debugging, data access, and handoffs between teams are bigger problems than content creation itself. That’s where he expects AI to have the fastest impact: by clearing the path, not replacing people.
The next advantage, according to Shaun, will come from structure and speed: teams that stay close to the work, know the audience deeply, and move fast enough to adjust when the signal changes. The studios that win won’t be the biggest.
They’ll be the ones that stay ready to change.
