Electronic Arts has announced that Jade Raymond, head of EA's Motive Studios, will be stepping down from her position and will be replaced by head of EA Mobile and CEO of Monolith Productions Samantha Ryan. The news comes from Game Informer who were issued the official statement by Electronic Arts.
The official statement by Electronic Arts reads as follows:
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.
Jade Raymond joined Electronic Arts in July of 2015, and founded EA's Canada based Motive Studios. She was also involved in Amy Hennig's cancelled
Star Wars open-world title from Visceral Games, which she was in charge of. Before joining Electronic Arts, she was working for Ubisoft and had produced several
Assassin's Creed titles.
The big project Motive Studios had was that canned
Star Wars project that didn't get to see the light of day. Ever since, we have heard little to nothing from the Toronto based studio. Perhaps that's one of the main reasons Jade decided to part ways with Electronic Arts, as cretive differences are a very viable reason. We have yet to hear an official statement by Jade Raymond, however.