Top woman of closed Stadia studio is working with new studio on PlayStation game
Canadian game developer Jade Raymond has started an independent game studio that will create a new PlayStation game. Raymond was in charge of one of Google’s own Studio for Stadia games, but Google recently shut it down.
The new studio is called Haven Studios and is located in Canada. The studio will be working on an unannounced title for PlayStation consoles. On the PlayStation blog, Raymond says she will be bringing together many of the “talented game developers” she has worked with before.
She does not say who they are. At least Daniel Drapeau, who was responsible for the design of Rainbow Six Siege and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and who was gameplay director for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, is joining Raymond on LinkedIn. This month he retired from Ubisoft and started working at Haven Studios.
Paola Jouyaux, who was a producer at EA and Ubisoft, including Battlefront II and Far Cry: Primal, and worked as a producer at Stadia with Raymond in recent years, has also been working at Haven Studios since this month, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Raymond is known for her leading role at Ubisoft in the development of the first Assassin’s Creed games and as executive producer of Watch Dogs. She has worked for Google since March 2019 as vice president in the Stadia division. She recently left Stadia after Google decided to close both of its own game studios.
Jade Raymond has been working in the games industry for 25 years and would like to get back to the core: making games, she writes in the blog post. “When I looked at my career over the past few years, and I thought about what I should do next, I came to a simple conclusion: I have to go back to what I like the most.”
The first game Raymond worked on was The Sims Online in 2002. In 2004 she started at Ubisoft in Montreal and was put in charge of the development of Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed Unity , Farcry 4 and most recently The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. In 2015, she left for EA, where she became responsible for Motive Studios, Visceral Games and the development of Star Wars: Battlefront II. She stopped there in 2018.