EA has announced that Jade Raymond, founder and studio head of EA Motive, has left Electronic Arts. Samantha Ryan, who’s the senior vice president of BioWare, Maxis, as well as EA’s mobile division, will be taking charge of Motive to replace the outgoing Raymond, while she continues to report to EA’s head of global publishing, Laure Miele.
Although EA gave no reasons as to why this change was made, their head of communications John Reseburg did give out a statement. “EA Studios is focused on bringing more creative new games and content to players,” the statement reads. “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.”
There’s quite a few projects at EA Motive that according to EA will remain “unchanged”. The studio is currently working on a Star Wars game, a Plants vs Zombies title, as well as an open world action adventure game that, according to Raymond, will try to “reinvent action-adventure games for the future”. Prior to her stint at Electronic Arts, Raymond had spent ten years at Ubisoft, where she worked on a number of Assassin’s Creed games, Splinter Cell Blacklist, and Watch Dogs.
