One of Electronic Arts’ most recognizable names has today left the publisher.
Jade Raymond, the studio head and founder of EA Motive, was revealed to be stepping down from her position as of today. Raymond, who previously worked at Ubisoft and helped create the Assassin’s Creed franchise, founded Motive Studios back in 2015. Since that time, the developer has helped work on last year’s release of Star Wars Battlefront II in addition to aiding with development on Visceral’s Star Wars project before the studio was closed. The company is currently in the process of working on an unannounced game.
EA released the following statement to Game Informer, speaking on the departure of Raymond and announcing that Samantha Ryan will be taking over as Motive’s studio head.
EA Studios is focused on bringing more creative new games and content to players. 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. 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.
With this change, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Electronic Arts. 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.
It’s uncertain at this moment what Raymond will do next as she has yet to release a public statement of her own. We’ll keep you posted on any upcoming details that may come out in the future both about this shift at Motive and what Raymond’s future could entail.