Motive Studios is parting ways with its founder. Jade Raymond is leaving behind EA’s Canadian development studio as the team continues working on several upcoming projects, including an unannounced Star Wars title and an action-adventure science-fiction game similar to Assassin’s Creed.
EA’s senior vice president Samantha Ryan will head Motive alongside her current role managing Maxis, Bioware, and EA’s mobile division, while the company’s head of global publishing Laure Miele will serve as Ryan’s supervisor. EA’s head of communications John Reseburg praised Ryan and her experience in a statement obtained by GamesBeat.
“EA Studios is focused on bringing more creative new games and content to players,” Reseburg told GamesBeat. “Laura Miele and her team have taken several steps internally to better support our game makers in this pursuit, such as expanding Samantha Ryan’s portfolio to lead additional studios, including Motive.”
“Samantha is known for driving creative design and supporting game teams so they can bring their visions to life,” Reseburg continued. “She is a deeply experienced game-maker with a gameography that spans from The Sims to Batman: Arkham City to No One Lives Forever to the highly-anticipated Anthem.”
Raymond’s departure comes just over three years after she joined EA from Ubisoft, where she played a pivotal role as the original Assassin’s Creed‘s producer and the first Watch Dogs‘ executive producer. While Motive has not released a dedicated game on its own yet, her studio previously worked on Star Wars: Battlefront II’s single-player campaign. Motive is also developing an unannounced Star Wars game and two unannounced IPs, which Raymond discussed as recently as this past July.
“We’re trying to reinvent action-adventure games for the future, an action-adventure game that lives on and the world is dynamic, living, and breathing,” Raymond told Game Informer. “I think that’s a great problem to solve because we make these amazing worlds and then you play through them and they are gone. What does a dynamic one look like?”
Amy Hennig, whose departure was made official at the end of June, left a formiddable knowledge gap after leaving the behemoth publisher (and triple-A development entirely, by her words). Now that Raymond, another prominent studio head, has moved on — what will happen to the projects that they were stewarding? EA insists that the projects are fine and will continue as planned. EA has since stressed that Motive’s current titles are “unchanged” by Raymond’s departure, although it remains unclear whether Raymond was actively working on all four projects before leaving EA.
“With this change, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Electronic Arts,” Reseburg told GamesBeat. “In her time with us, Jade helped to build great teams, and our projects underway at Motive and other studios continue unchanged. We’re appreciative of all of her efforts, and we wish Jade all the best as she moves on to her next adventure.”
“We are driving greater creativity into everything we do across EA Studios, and we’ll look forward to sharing more in the months to come,” Reseburg continued.
Reseburg confirmed to GameDaily that Raymond is no longer with the company and that EA has no further details to share.
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