Media Molecule Co-Founder David Smith Departs to Focus on Personal Projects

Media Molecule co-founder David Smith has announced that he’s leaving the studio after nearly 20 years in order to focus on his own personal projects.
In a message on social media, Smith says that while he’s “proud” of everything Media Molecule has created, he has been “feeling a growing itch to explore truly wild ideas and make things based on [his] personal whimsy”.
He says that while he still “greatly enjoy[s] the creative dynamic of working at Media Molecule”, he doesn’t have enough time to do so and work on his personal projects “without entirely giving up on pursuing that mythical creature called ‘work-life balance'”.

Although he’s leaving the studio, Smith says he “hope[s] to be involved with Media Molecule in future”, and that he wants to “drop in from time to time”, praising the “positivity and free exchange of ideas” that he says “remains true to the founding spirit of the company”.
It’s not clear exactly what personal projects Smith will be working on; whether he intends to start a new studio away from Media Molecule is unclear. We may well learn more about his plans in the coming months.
If you’re unfamiliar with Media Molecule, it’s a development studio that was founded back in 2006 by Smith and three others: Mark Healey (who departed the studio himself back in 2023), Alex Evans, and Kareem Ettouney.
The company’s first game as Media Molecule was 2008’s PS3 exclusive LittleBigPlanet, a platformer that emphasized user-generated levels, although it did also offer a campaign of its own created by Media Molecule staffers.

LittleBigPlanet would go on to become a successful franchise for Sony, with two further sequels and a number of spinoffs arriving in subsequent years, although Media Molecule itself stepped away from the series in 2014.
The studio’s most recent release is Dreams, the PS4 creativity sandbox that acts as a game and content creation tool more than a title in and of itself. Live support for Dreams ended in 2023, but Media Molecule said at the time that it was moving onto an “exciting new project”, although we still don’t know what that might be.