EA announced some big organizational changes today. Jade Raymond, the head of EA Motive, the studio focused on Star War properties, is leaving her position.
During Raymond’s time, Battlefront II was released, but we knew the studio was also working on multiple projects, including an open-world Star Wars game, a new action-adventure IP, and a mysterious project. Raymond joined back in 2015 to head a multi-purpose studio, which would create its own IP and provide support for other EA projects. Raymond previously worked at Ubisoft as producer on the Assassin’s Creed series and executive producer on both Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. We do not know Raymond’s plans at this time for her next venture.
We do, however, know Samantha Ryan will be taking Raymond’s place. Ryan has an impressive resume, previously working as president of Monolith and as SVP of product and development at Warner Bros. Ryan has been helping lead other teams at EA, from BioWare to Maxis.
EA issued the following statement to Game Informer:
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.
EA Motive has seen its share of ups and downs, announcing the closure of Visceral Games and putting an end to its single-player, linear Star Wars game. The project is currently being revamped to go in a more open-world direction.
A few months ago when we talked to Raymond, she discussed some road bumps with Motive’s new IP. Raymond noted some people who joined the project early on already left and the game still hadn’t left the conceptual phase.
